Hart Island: Urban Park Rangers Offer Tours of Gotham’s Necropolis

Hart Island has served many uses since the 19th Century, including a military training ground for Black Civil War soldiers, a quarantine station, a psychiatric hospital, a reform school, a rehabilitation facility, a missile base, a jail, and now a burial ground.

The most northeastern of New York City’s more than 40 islands, though classified as uninhabited, one might say that Hart Island is filled with people — estimates range from 800,000 to 1,000,000 — but none of them pay taxes or vote. It’s a one mile long by 1/3 mile wide necropolis, about a half mile off the northern side of City Island. To get to the 130-acre park, you’ll need to take a 10-minute ferry ride.

The NYC Parks Department is offering guided Urban Park Ranger tours of parts of the Island four times this fall. Unlike any of their other Urban Park Ranger tours, this one is strictly by lottery. There are two tours of the northern part of the island on September 15 and October 13; the southern tours will be available on September 29 and October 27. A maximum of three dozen people are eligible for the two hour guided tours. Either tour involves up to a mile and a half of walking.

On a recent weekday media trip there, Straus News joined other reporters on a somber two hour tour of the south part of the island. The park rangers provided an excellent historical narrative of what has happened since the Hunter family sold the island to New York City in 1868. While there were many structures erected on the Island, including a prison bunkhouse for inmates who did their service there, and a women’s mental institution, the only existing full structure visible is four walls of the Catholic chapel, built in 1935 for the resident prison population. Those residents left the island in 1966. Almost all of the existing island buildings were torn down four years ago.

This is just a small part of the Islands’ nearly 160 year history. To flesh out some of the interesting components of the island, the ranger tour was perfect, as it highlighted different facets of the people who have occupied the island through the years.

A ranger played a recorded oral history spoken in 2015 by Casimiro “Caz” Torres, a reformed prisoner who became a leader with The Fortune Society, which helps those who have been released from incarceration. While the prison had been closed, other institutions remained. He arrived on the island after some lawbreaking, assigned to the cemetery crew, burying bodies. Among this work, he had to bury unclaimed babies.

Another ranger noted in 1924, a Black Harlem developer, Solomon Riley, bought four acres on the southern end of Hart Island, still privately owned, for $35,000 after the city declined to purchase the land. Riley envisioned an accessible beach resort and amusement park, referred to as “Negro Coney Island” because of discrimination of African-Americans at similar places in the NYC region.

When building was completed, there were eight boarding houses, a dance hall, boardwalk and a pavilion for swimmers. The city condemned the project with concerns that this resort near a prison would not work well. When Riley had to sell the land back to the city for $144,000, his dream is over.

A Place Not Just for Dead People

Another historical obscurity is how Phoenix House had its roots on Hart Island. From 1967 to 1976, it was a progressive experiment, where judges could send convicted minor drug offense people to treatment instead of jail.

Over 350 resident patients maintained vegetable gardens, published a newsletter and held large outdoor music festivals to fund the project. The financial crisis of 1976 meant no more ferry funding however, and Phoenix House permanently moved off the island.

There are markers for each group of the buried, older ones comprising unmarked graves for 150 people, newer plastic stakes for the graves of 200 people in that cluster. The saddest ones, separated by a wide space, are 34 unmarked graves for AIDS sufferers, who were buried deeper in the ground than the other occupants.

Ranger Whalen spoke passionately about their plight in the 80’s, when funeral directors in New York State would not perform their usual services for this group. There is one marker, well separated from this group; a baby who was born with AIDS, and didn’t live a long time.

“The baby was born in a hospital, played with by both nurses and doctors, and lived a life,” Whalen explained. Of all the people buried on Harts Island, this might be the saddest story of all.

The COVID pandemic also played a part in Hart Island history; we were shown a chart that there were 850 burials in 2019; a year later, it was 2000.

A visit here is totally unlike any other New York City tour. Although there aren’t any restrictions for bringing children, there is a lot of heart-wrenching information to process by each visitor, and kids may not have the capacity to process all the information amid the somber surroundings. A trip to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn or Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx might be a better place to bring children though this certainly is an adventure.

And this was just one half of the island!

The NYC Parks Department and Human Resources Administration took the island over in 2021 from the NYC Department of Correction. The Parks Department has plans to revise Hart Island’s amenities, including, a first-ever welcome center with restrooms, seating, air conditioning and signage. Currently, There are no indoor facilities, restrooms or drinking fountains on Hart Island. There are portable restrooms on the island.

Also in the works is a chapel and designated pathways for visiting gravestones safely; climate change provisions to fortify the island’s coasts against severe weather and rising sea levels; and planting new trees.

If you feel you have a loved one buried on Hart Island, the city has an online searchable database of internments there through its Cemetery Management Tracking System.