Hart Island, the mile-long slip of land that has served as New York City’s public cemetery for more than a century, is experiencing a rebirth of sorts.
But city lawmakers are grappling with how best to honor its legacy, while reimagining it for future generations.
The City Council will take public testimony this week as lawmakers reconcile the island’s history as a final resting place for the city’s poor and unclaimed — including many lost to AIDS — and a parks department plan to revitalize and further open the space to the public.
In addition to hearing from the public, the joint hearing between the committees on health, general welfare, and parks and recreation will also take up a measure introduced by Councilmember Diana Ayala that would require the city’s social services and parks departments to undertake a comprehensive study of current burial practices, including trench locations, dimensions and depth. The report would also estimate remaining capacity and recommend potential changes.
Hart Island, located just off the northeastern edge of the Bronx near City Island, is the graveyard for more than a million New Yorkers, buried in plain pine boxes in trench-style graves.
For decades, the city’s Department of Correction had overseen the island, and Rikers detainees helped bury the dead. But people with loved ones buried on the island had long complained that visiting was onerous and the upkeep was insufficient. Stewardship of the island was passed to the parks department in 2021.
Access to the island has since expanded to include both gravesite visits and public tours. And earlier this summer, the parks department unveiled a plan to remake the island, which includes building a welcome center with restrooms and seating, restoring the island’s chapel as a place for remembrance, and installing walking paths to connect new landscaped lawns and gardens. The plan also includes repairs to the island’s shoreline to help combat sea-level rise.
Councilmember Shekar Krishnan, who chairs the council’s Committee on Parks and Recreation, said he’s visited the island and found it to be a place of “deep sadness, solitude, memory and family.” He described this week’s hearing as an opportunity to hear from those whose loved ones are buried there.
Hart Island, “first and foremost, is a very, very hallowed burial ground,” Krishnan said. “So the legislation we're hearing, and our hearing overall, is to make sure we understand how the parks department will continue to preserve that meaning of Hart Island going forward.”
At a May budget hearing, then-Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue praised her department’s work on the island, specifically the park rangers’ work facilitating gravesite visits for loved ones alongside twice-monthly public tours. The department, she said, “was looking at how we can re-envision access to the island” while keeping it “a solemn and peaceful site.”
There are also questions about the island’s capacity and how much longer it can continue to serve as a burial site. A 2022 study commissioned by the city estimated the island could run out of space as early as 2030. And last year, the publication The City reported that the Human Resources Administration, the agency in charge of burials on the island, had increased the number of caskets in each trench from 150 to 200.
Ayala’s measure revisits the question of capacity in light of the park department’s proposals, instructing the departments to assess “whether any existing plans to improve public access to Hart Island present barriers to changes in burial procedures on Hart Island.”
The Hart Island Project, an advocacy group that catalogs and maps the island’s graves, has pushed city lawmakers to consider alternatives to the current burial system. The group has proposed recycling gravesites through a process called “lift and deepen.” Under that method, which is used in cemeteries around the world, after a set number of years, a person’s remains are removed from their gravesite, placed in a mortuary box, and buried again at the foot of the original grave.
Melinda Hunt, the group’s founding director, says the status quo is untenable, both because “mass graves are totally culturally inappropriate” and sea level rise will threaten future burial sites. “ There's just no way they can continue to dig these 8 foot holes in the southern part of the island.”
As water fills the underground trenches, the ground will become unstable, Hunt said. She doesn’t have issues with the planned visitor center and other improvements, “ but if bodies are coming out of the ground, none of that matters.”
