In July 2021, after years of lobbying and activism, Hart Island’s management will pass from the Department of Correction to the City’s Department of Parks & Recreation (NYC Parks). Burials will no longer be performed by Rikers inmates, and the “No Trespassers” sign on the dock will disappear, beginning to re-integrate a place defined for 150 years by neglect and obscurity with the rest of the city. These changes are deeply important to those with loved ones buried on the Island, and to many other New Yorkers besides. At the same time, activists have lobbied to have the cemetery listed as a National Historic Landmark. The campaign, led by Melinda Hunt of the Hart Island Project, may hinge on proving the Civil War origins of Hart Island’s burial techniques: namely, stacking the unknown or unclaimed dead in unmarked trenches using conscripted labor. Hart Island’s 150-year-old stigma is inextricable from such massed burial practices, yet the campaign for National Landmark status would protect them. With a few adjustments, New York would continue burying people this way. In effect, the campaign attempts to use the past to re-imagine the present, to see Hart Island’s trench burials not as a shameful signifier of belonging to New York’s lonely and forgotten, but as an important tradition — begun in the Civil War — that confers dignified historical associations upon the departed. It implicitly demands respectful recognition for any New Yorker who rests after death as they lived in their City: cheek by jowl, above, below, and alongside strangers. New Yorkers may previously have regarded the burial pits as distressing, the Landmark campaign’s argument goes, but they can now take pride in them as possessed of cultural significance.

Cemetery by default What became Hart Island was originally a home to the Siwanoy people. Settler ownership began with Dr. Thomas Pell in 1654, but the island’s first civic uses came over two centuries later, as a training facility for United States Colored Troops in 1864, and a prison for captured Confederates in 1865. In 1868, the City bought the island for the Department of Charities and Correction to use as overflow for the Randall’s Island reformatory school for boys. It began to bury the very poor and those unclaimed or unidentified the following year. The system of unmarked common graves began in 1872. Like many New York City islands, Hart Island has hosted myriad public institutions that City authorities deemed better unseen: a workhouse, mental asylum, reformatory, prison, tuberculosis sanatorium, Cold War missile base, and drug rehabilitation facility. Its use as a cemetery has endured beyond all others, but Correction’s involvement was an historical accident. The Department of Public Charities and Correction received the original authority to operate the cemetery. When the Public Charities wing split off to become the Human Resources Agency, Correction still operated a prison and thus a labor force on Hart Island, so it seemed logical for that agency to continue with burial duties.

Hart Island has been New York’s default solution to an intractable problem that every local government faces: how best to provide burials of last resort. Designating a potter’s field or even a working burial ground as a park is not, in itself, unusual. Some of the City’s most beloved parks have history as paupers’ graves — including Madison Square, Bryant Park, and Washington Square, which alone holds 20,000 yellow fever victims. A corner of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park still operates as a Quaker Burial Ground, so there is contemporary precedent for it too. But common burial practices in more visible cemeteries have changed.

Undoubtedly, the Civil War’s massive death toll shaped how Americans care for their dead today. Most significantly, we see its legacy in the widespread preference for embalming, a practice that gave families a way to preserve a soldier’s body enough to get it home by rail, and was first popularized by its use for Abraham Lincoln. We also see the Civil War’s contemporary influence in the insistence on bringing war dead home for burial, even from historic wars. No other country pursues a no-resources- or expenses-spared policy to bring the fallen home. This has become a hallmark of American exceptionalism. The remains of the twenty Union and 235 Confederate soldiers who died on Hart Island, however, are long gone to other cemeteries. Some were never buried there, and those who were likely had individual graves, as trench burial began here a decade after Appomattox. Today’s US military war dead rest not in massed graves, but more usually in dedicated cemeteries, in a mark of the special status veterans are accorded within American society. Veterans mistakenly buried on Hart Island have been disinterred and reburied with military honors.

The first popular record of Hart Island burials, in Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, suggests as much. Riis makes clear that such burials were not the result of sacrifices freely chosen, but occurred because “bitter poverty has denied” to some New Yorkers “the poor privilege of the choice of the home in death they were denied in life.” He deplored Hart Island’s “common trench”\[7] as an example of the inequality he campaigned against. The Landmark campaign might unwittingly substitute an apparent historical military link for a more definitive and disquieting one. The bodies of Union Army dead had often decomposed following long exposure after battle, and Colored Troops found themselves responsible for burial duties. Assigning this deeply unpleasant work to Black men signaled their ongoing stigma within the army they served. Racism’s fault lines have persisted on the island, of course: the Riker’s Island inmates on burial detail are disproportionately African American and Latino men sentenced or awaiting trial on minor charges, reflecting the intersection of racism and incarceration in the US justice system. Parks management will sever this literal connection, but it cannot — nor should it, arguably — attempt to sanitize other legacies of racism on Hart Island. Those buried there are disproportionately African Americans and Latinx. Further, potter’s fields in the United States are resting places for countless victims of racist crime. The lynched were often buried communally and anonymously as a final humiliation and punishment, and warning against protest.

It is possible that Landmark status for Hart Island could draw salutary attention to New York’s ongoing problems of class and racial inequality, but it is difficult to imagine without confronting more precisely what people have found so troubling, so disrespectful and undignified, about Hart Island’s burials. Was it mourners’ inability to attend the burials, or the communal trenches? Was it the fact that the gravediggers were inmates, or the lack of individual memorialization? Was it that visits have for so long been coercively controlled by the Department of Correction, or that finding out what had happened to a loved one was so difficult? The transfer of management will address some, but not all, of these issues. The conditions of Landmark status would preserve some of them. During my fieldwork interviews, the bereaved of those buried on Hart Island mentioned all these points, but above all resented the lack of autonomy in choosing a final resting place for their kin. I met relatives of the dead who had feared Hart Island, yet were pleasantly surprised on their first visit to find it a beautiful and tranquil place, abundant with deer, osprey and other wildlife. Some told me that the end of Correction’s involvement ended the shame, and Hart Island could become a place that New Yorkers might cherish. Others remained unreconciled, the island’s thorny difficulties still sharp.

A cemetery is more than a location where bodies are buried. It is a place apart, where people can commemorate the dead, perform rituals, visit and memorialize, and honor the deceased according to religious and other traditions. Of course, active cemeteries also put people in their place, so to speak: marking ongoing hierarchies, relationships and identities in the world relinquished by the deceased. But ideally, they do so in a manner consistent with the wishes of the bereaved and their families. In its current form, by this definition, Hart Island falls short in several ways. Generally, across the West, people expect the deceased to have an individual place and a marker. There are plenty of exceptions, such as anonymously scattering ashes in nature, but crucially this option has been freely chosen, and is often deeply meaningful.

Communal burials are most often associated with war, disaster and contagion; when normal social rules bow to urgency in disposing of overwhelming numbers of bodies. They also often follow ethnic cleansing or genocide in which the dead were seen by those interring them as less than full citizens or fully human. Over time these meanings can transform, and mass graves can become sites of pilgrimage for commemorating tragedy and reflecting on national values. Places like Auschwitz, Ground Zero, and Chernobyl, which have seen great human suffering and horrific crimes, have even become tourist destinations. But in each of these cases, the place’s meaning has changed in part because the events that caused the pain and death have ended, wrongs were acknowledged, and time was allowed (and, often, great effort and resources expended) for the site to transform into something different. There has been accounting and atonement for the suffering that happened there. Beyond the question of how invoking the Civil War might sacralize space and behavior at Hart Island lies a simpler question: can a massed grave be destigmatized while still in operation?

If the answer is no, this creates practical difficulties for the City that go beyond history or remembrance, difficulties that the coronavirus pandemic has made all too clear. If Hart Island closes as an active cemetery, what would happen to New Yorkers who needed help with burial? Would families consent to cremation, placing further strain on the City’s handful of crematories? If the new burial site was even further away, how would the bereaved be able to visit? Perhaps establishing an official connection to the Civil War, however historically tenuous, wouldn’t matter to the bereaved if it helped make Hart Island more like a “normal” cemetery. National Historic Landmark status would secure invaluable recognition and federal funding for Hart Island, making it more accessible. Its enhanced reputation could certainly help relieve some of the longstanding stigma of burial there. And it would cap decades of resolute activism.