Île des Morts
Posted: Mon Nov 25, 2013 6:12 pm
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/nyreg ... il0=y&_r=1&On Tuesday morning, the first snow flurries of the season fell on New York’s potter’s field, drifting down into an open trench, dusting the dirt next to hundreds of corpses in bare wooden caskets.
Here on a grassy expanse toward the south end of Hart Island, off the Bronx, the trenches are 10 feet deep and as long as a football field. They fill up steadily with the dead — the homeless, poor, stillborn and other unclaimed bodies — delivered by truck and ferry from all over New York City, for unceremonious interment.
The current trench should be filled before Christmas. Then the gravediggers, a cadre of inmates bused over from Rikers Island on Tuesdays through Fridays, will begin sowing the next crop of caskets in a pit, freshly dug and running adjacent, said Capt. Martin Thompson of the city’s Correction Department, which manages operations on the island.
His crews follow a grim arithmetic: up to 1,500 bodies buried a year, organized into 70-foot-long plots that, with caskets stacked three-high in rows of six, can hold about 150 adults each, or 1,000 infants, who are buried in trenches separate from the adults. On this 101-acre island, the number of burials since 1869 now approaches one million.
The tour on Tuesday was the first time a reporter had been allowed near the burial site in years, despite the many requests the department receives.
