Potter's Field - 2

There are no ceremonies for the dead here on Hart Island.  Inmates from Riker's Island are assigned burial detail and are ferried over to do the work.  Coffins are stacked beneath the ground--3 high, 10 across, 5 rows deep, between each of the white grave markers--crowding 150 adult bodies into each marked square.  Infant's coffins are stacked in trenches and buried.

What otherwise might have served as an idyllic retreat of meadows, woodlands and sand dunes, Hart holds too many ghosts--from the sturdy anachronisms that whisper of a more vital time, to the terrifying reality of the Nike bases, to the seemingly boundless fields of the unclaimed dead--to ever be anything more than a sad, sad island.

First published by the New York Correction History Society