Injustice that can’t be buried: Hart Island, under coronavirus strain

For generations, poor communities have been haunted by the specter of a pauper’s grave on Hart Island, a strip of land off-limits to the public, where New York disposes of the unclaimed dead. Yet despite newspaper investigations, documentaries and lawsuits exposing the indignities of a potter’s field run like a secret jail, many New Yorkers were either unaware of its existence, or considered it a graveyard of last resort for homeless people.

But that has changed, like so much else in recent weeks, as the city staggers under the toll of the coronavirus. Instead of being only a place for “other people” — the unfortunate, destitute and forgotten — Hart Island has been revealed as the last resort for us all.

Drone images of mass burials have circulated internationally, emblems of dread at the power of this disease to lay modern societies low. To reassure those horrified by the sight of inmates wedging boxed corpses into muddy trenches, officials explained that this was the city’s pre-pandemic norm. Nevertheless, after 150 years of using jail labor to bury a million New Yorkers, the city abruptly hired contract workers in protective suits for the grim task, instead of prisoners dressed chain-gang style.

This could be a pivotal moment in the long struggle to transform Hart Island. But real change requires an unsparing confrontation of its inequities, not normalization.

Whose loved ones wind up in these anonymous common graves?

The same people hardest-hit by the virus — poor, black, old and immigrant New Yorkers — also find it harder than ever to scrape up funeral costs, which average $8,000, even without a formal service. The same underpaid cashiers, cleaners and delivery workers now hailed as “essential” are at increasing risk of being stacked three-deep with 150 strangers.

As pandemic deaths have mounted, faced with overflowing morgues, the city has increased Hart Island burials five-fold. The grace period to claim a body has been cut to two weeks from 30 days, even as many funeral homes and crematories are too backlogged to offer timely private alternatives.

Long before the pandemic, hospitals and nursing homes had spotty records of notifying relatives about a death, pointing people toward pre-paid funeral funds, or even correctly tagging bodies. Now, these overwhelmed institutions are even more likely to fall short, just when quarantined or ailing families are hard-pressed even to track the whereabouts of a dying grandmother.

Officials skirt the issue by calling hurried interments “temporary burials” that can be undone — a concept first pushed in 2014 after medical examiner scandals over bodies lost, mixed up or mistakenly consigned to Hart Island when they were entitled to a veterans cemetery.

At best, the term “temporary” obscures the grim realities of digging up corpses after months or years from an island where storms leave skulls scattered on eroded shorelines. It omits the difficulties, delays and expense involved, and glosses over a process that requires reshuffling the remains of others.

At worst, families struggling with terrible grief and crushing financial burdens are being rushed to accept a loved one’s burial in a place they consider humiliating.

Aja Worthy-Davis, a spokeswoman for the office of the chief medical examiner, hedged on how long families have to decide.

“The 15-day period is not a deadline,” she told me in an emailed statement. “When we connect with a family, we provide the time needed to plan final arrangements,” or else send the body to Hart Island with their knowledge or as a final option.

But Mark Levine, the chair of the City Council Health Committee, says he is fielding frantic calls from families unable to find or pay a funeral home to act in time.

“There’s much more that we should have done before this crisis, and that we must do after this crisis, to ensure that there are options,” he said.

To me, these issues are not abstract. I am haunted by cases I discovered during a year-long New York Times investigation: The housekeeper whose court-appointed guardian allowed her home to go into foreclosure, and her body to go unclaimed; the opera costume designer who escaped the Holocaust, but not Hart Island; the homeless boy buried in an $8 suit.

“Did we want him in potter’s field? Hell no!” the boy’s big sister cried 20 years later. “We didn’t have the money. I felt so bad knowing that my brother’s body was just taken and dumped.”

Secrecy has compounded the lack of accountability. Unlike Chicago and Los Angeles, New York, citing privacy, will not publicly identify the waiting dead; even religious burial charities are denied morgue lists.

“We need to do more to simply inform loved ones,” Levine said. “There are far too many people who wind up at Hart simply because the person didn’t understand what their options are.”

Few of those buried anonymously in recent years were wealthy. But, contrary to stereotype, neither were they all friendless or destitute — at least not until end-of-life care drained their savings. Some were stillborn infants whose mothers searched for years to find where their baby’s remains had gone.

Yet it took years of litigation for relatives of the buried to win minimal access to the island, which is still run by the Department of Correction. Those approved for a visit have to register with the government and pass through a razor-wired entrance to a special ferry, subject to a search and the confiscation of cellphones.

Only when the coronavirus ran rampant in the Rikers Island jails did the city stop using inmates paid $1 an hour to do Hart Island burials. If the change is made permanent, as it should be, it could be a breakthrough in plans to transfer the island to the Parks Department under a bill approved by the City Council last year.

But what that transfer would mean in practice is undecided. Even a plan for public transportation to the island is not due until July of 2022. The transfer was partly based on the expectation that burials, which had been averaging 1,200 a year, would be reduced. No one was anticipating a pandemic.

One prominent advocate, Melinda Hunt, has faith in rebranding. After the latest drone images drew public horror, she told CNN, “We need to do away with the shame, and talk about it as a good place to be buried.”

Hunt, who founded the non-profit Hart Island Project to support families of the buried and to push for public access, has proposed making the island a “natural” or “green” burial site. Green burials, chosen by a small, but growing number of ecologically-minded people, are designed to hasten the body’s decomposition, typically by placing it without a coffin in a shallow hole near natural vegetation. Not a standard decision, by any means.

Oddly, cremation, the most popular funerary choice in America, and one embraced by other cities, is never discussed. If the city offered cremation as an option in the future, more families could afford to claim a loved one; they would gain time to raise money to bury cremated remains privately, or to plan a memorial when scattering them. The burial of unclaimed ashes on Hart Island would no longer require bulldozers and cranes and the prospect of Hart Island running out of burial space, or of new bones turning up after the next hurricane.

But New York State law, which until 2016 required the city to offer unclaimed bodies for medical school dissection within 48 hours, still bans the city from cremating the unclaimed dead. Why? Rationales cited at various times — religious sensitivities, the political clout of funeral directors, the importance of DNA, ecological concerns — do not stand up well after the city has resorted to “temporary” common graves for some people who surely wanted to be cremated.

In contrast, Los Angeles County cremates unclaimed remains after a waiting period, providing families up to three years to reclaim the ashes of a loved one for a relatively modest fee, and buries unclaimed ashes in a well-attended public ceremony, in a cemetery accessible to all.

During the chaos of the coronavirus crisis, there may be no better alternative than gouging more trenches out of the bulldozed barrens of the island, where the crumbling ruins of 19th-century asylums coexist with fragile natural beauty. But at a time when the COVID-19 disaster is laying bare the structural dysfunction of the nation’s economic and health care systems, surely the pandemic also demands a New York reckoning with the American way of death.

In good times, four out of 10 adults in the United States do not have the resources to cover an unplanned $400 expense. Public grants for burial are meager: A Social Security death benefit — $225 — has not increased since 1954. The city officially provides up to $900 for funeral expenses for low-income residents, but only if the total cost does not exceed $1,700, a sum that buys virtually no funeral in New York. Legal immigrants are increasingly afraid to ask for any public aid; undocumented residents are ineligible.

One result is the rising popularity of body donation among the poor, in exchange for the promise of free cremation. The practice has been promoted by a booming, largely unregulated industry that cashes in on body parts turned into trademarked products like bone paste, dental implants and lip-plumping gel. Its grisly record of abuses and deceit was detailed in a seven-part Reuters series.

In that context, at a time when mortality and isolation weigh on all New Yorkers, Hart Island seems to summon us to do better for both the living and the dead.

“Hart Island has always been the place where we have buried the marginalized,” Levine said. “It’s at the margins of our city, and outside the imagination of our city, and that’s why it’s been neglected.”

“If there’s anything positive out of this otherwise hellish situation,” he added, “it’s that our public has now come to understand that there’s a public cemetery which is under our stewardship, and that we owe it to the one million New Yorkers buried there to provide them with a dignified resting place.”

Bernstein is a former New York Times reporter.