Hart Island

Hart Island sits less than a mile off the eastern shoreline of the Bronx, in the Long Island Sound. From a passing boat it appears unremarkable — low grass, weathered structures, rows of small white markers rising at intervals from the earth. There is no skyline drama, no visible monument. It looks, from a distance, like a quiet and forgotten place.

It is not forgotten. It is actively used, to this day, as New York City's public cemetery — what officials call a potter's field, a term with roots in the Gospel of Matthew, where it described the burial ground purchased with the thirty pieces of silver returned by Judas. A field bought with blood money, used to bury strangers. The phrase has carried that ambiguity ever since.

Since 1869, more than one million people are believed to have been buried on Hart Island^[3]. Most lie in long trenches, in plain pine boxes stacked in layers, beneath numbered markers that correspond to entries in municipal ledgers. They are not anonymous to the record — every burial is logged — but the record is not a monument.

During the height of the AIDS epidemic, between roughly 1983 and 1996, thousands of people who died of AIDS-related illnesses were buried there. The first documented AIDS burials on Hart Island took place in 1985, when seventeen people who had died of AIDS-related illnesses — including a child, the first known pediatric AIDS death in New York City, whose grave marker reads SC-B1, 1985 (Special Case–Baby 1) — were interred individually, fourteen feet deep, on the isolated southern tip of the island, out of what city officials would later concede was an "overabundance of caution" driven by fear of contagion^[6]. They arrived at Hart Island through a process that was bureaucratic, systematic, and, for those left behind, often devastating. To understand what happened on Hart Island during those years, you have to understand both the place and the epidemic — and the ways in which both exposed the limits of how American society recognized a life.

Hart Island has served many functions over its history, most of them defined by the city's need to manage people it did not know what to do with. During the Civil War it housed a Union prisoner-of-war camp. In the late nineteenth century it held a workhouse, a reformatory for women, and a hospital for yellow fever patients. In the twentieth century it housed a Nike missile battery during the Cold War, a drug rehabilitation program called Phoenix House, and a boys' reformatory. Through all of it, the potter's field continued operating. The island accumulated purposes like sediment.

The decision to use Hart Island as a public cemetery was not made in a moment of humanitarian concern. It was made in response to a practical problem: New York City had more unclaimed dead than it could inter elsewhere. The city needed a place. Hart Island was available. The arrangement has persisted, with various administrative changes, for more than 150 years.

What defines burial on Hart Island is the legal classification of 'unclaimed.' Under New York City administrative code, when a person dies and no legally recognized next of kin or authorized representative completes burial arrangements within a required timeframe — historically around 30 days — the body is classified as unclaimed and transferred to Hart Island. The classification is administrative. It says nothing about whether the person was loved, whether people mourned them, whether their death left a hole in someone's life that has never closed.

That gap between administrative classification and human reality is, in ordinary times, a significant problem. During the AIDS epidemic, it became a catastrophe.

The city was, from the early 1980s onward, the epicenter of the American AIDS epidemic. By 1990, AIDS had become the leading cause of death for New York City residents between the ages of 25 and 44^[2]. The neighborhoods most devastated were concentrated in lower Manhattan, the West Village, Chelsea, Hell's Kitchen, and parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Harlem.

The communities most affected were gay and bisexual men, intravenous drug users, and — in numbers that received far less public attention — Black and Latino New Yorkers, including women and children. The epidemic did not observe the boundaries that public discourse tried to draw around it.

Effective combination antiretroviral therapy would not arrive until 1996^[4]. Until then, an AIDS diagnosis was, in most cases, a terminal one. The median survival time after diagnosis in the early years was less than two years.

Into this context came the bureaucratic machinery of Hart Island. When patients died in city hospitals, administrators turned to intake paperwork for next-of-kin information. When that information was incomplete, outdated, or led to relatives who were estranged, unreachable, or unwilling to assume responsibility — and when the legally required window expired — the body was classified as unclaimed. Pine boxes were ordered. Boats carried the dead across the East River. Numbers were entered in ledgers.

There is another dimension to Hart Island's history during these years that demands acknowledgment: the labor of burial was performed by incarcerated men transported from Rikers Island, New York City's main jail complex.

From the mid-nineteenth century through 2021, Hart Island was administered by the New York City Department of Correction. Inmates from Rikers — most of them pre-trial detainees who had not been convicted of any crime, held because they could not afford bail — were brought to the island to dig trenches, carry pine boxes, and cover graves. They were paid roughly fifty cents to one dollar an hour, depending on the era^[7]. They performed this labor for the dead of New York City for more than 150 years.

During the AIDS epidemic, those incarcerated workers buried thousands of people who had died of AIDS-related illnesses. Many of the workers themselves came from communities devastated by the epidemic. Some had friends or family members among the dead. The labor of burial — intimate, physically demanding, and carrying a weight that is not captured in any administrative record — was performed by people at the bottom of the city's social hierarchy, performing an essential function that the city preferred not to examine too closely.

The New York City Council voted in 2019 to transfer oversight of Hart Island from the Department of Correction to the Department of Parks and Recreation; the full operational handover was completed in July 2021, after years of sustained advocacy by the Hart Island Project and other organizations^[8]. Burials are now performed by a paid civilian workforce. The change came more than 150 years after the arrangement began.

For much of Hart Island's history, its burial records were notoriously difficult for families to access. The ledgers existed — the city had always logged its burials — but they were held by the Department of Correction, which operated Hart Island as a correctional facility, and access was tightly controlled. Families who suspected a loved one might be buried there had limited official recourse.

Melinda Hunt began documenting Hart Island in 1991, initially as a photographic project in collaboration with photographer Joel Sternfeld^[9]. What she encountered — the scale of the burials, the stories of families who could not access information about their dead, the layers of institutional opacity — transformed the project into a decades-long advocacy campaign. The Hart Island Project, incorporated as a nonprofit in 2011, worked over decades to force greater transparency, establish a searchable online database of burial records, and ultimately secure the transfer of records to the NYC Municipal Archives^[9].

That work matters enormously. Thousands of families have used the database to locate burial information for people they lost. For many, the confirmation of a grave location — even a numbered plot in a numbered trench — was the first piece of official acknowledgment that the person they mourned had existed and died in a place that could be found.

In the 1980s and into the 1990s, same-sex relationships had no legal recognition anywhere in the United States. In many states, consensual same-sex intimacy was still a criminal offense under sodomy laws that would not be struck down until Lawrence v. Texas in 2003. Gay men who were open about their relationships could lose their jobs, their housing, and in some cases their families, with no legal recourse.

Partners who had lived together for years, who had built lives together, who were in every practical sense each other's primary family, had no legal standing at the moment of death. Hospitals were not legally required to consult them. Biological relatives who had been estranged for years — who in some cases had rejected their family member specifically because of their sexual orientation — could, and sometimes did, override the wishes of partners and chosen family.

The AIDS epidemic became one of the primary catalysts for the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships. The sight of partners being turned away from hospital rooms, being excluded from memorial services, being left with nothing after years of shared life, galvanized the LGBT rights movement in ways that legislation alone had not. The domestic partnership protections that began appearing in some cities and states in the late 1980s and early 1990s were, in significant part, responses to what the epidemic had exposed. The eventual path to marriage equality — achieved federally in 2015 — ran through the grief of the AIDS years.

But for the people buried on Hart Island in the interim, the legal changes came too late. They lived and died in the world as it was, not as it eventually became.

Hart Island remains an active public cemetery. It is reachable only by ferry and is not open for independent public visitation. The NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, which has administered the island since 2021, offers ranger-led tours and monthly public and family visitation days by registration; families may also request burial information and arrange visits through the NYC Municipal Archives^[10].

Visitors who have documented their visits describe the strangeness of standing somewhere so close to the density of New York City — the skyline is visible from the island's western shore — while surrounded by such stillness. The white markers rise from the grass in rows. Each corresponds to a number in a ledger. Most correspond to a name in that ledger, though the name is not on the marker.

There is no monument on Hart Island listing the names of those buried there during the AIDS epidemic. There is no plaque marking the graves from the peak years. The AIDS Memorial Quilt exists. The National AIDS Memorial in San Francisco exists. Various local memorials exist in cities across the country. Hart Island has no equivalent. The bodies are there. The record is there. The monument is not.

The people buried on Hart Island during the AIDS epidemic were not unclaimed because they were unloved. The record describes an administrative outcome. It does not describe the relationships that preceded it.

Some were excluded by the legal architecture of a society that refused to recognize their families. Some were erased by documentation systems that recorded the names on government ID rather than the names by which they lived. Some were overtaken by bureaucratic timelines in institutions overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis. Some had families who searched for them and found them only years later, in a numbered field on an island in the East River.

The epidemic killed, in the United States alone, more than 448,000 people between 1981 and 2000^[1] — with more than 774,000 AIDS diagnoses reported to CDC by the end of that year. It killed people whom the legal system did not recognize, in communities the government was slow to help, in a context of stigma that made asking for help dangerous, in a period before effective treatment, surrounded by people who loved them and in many cases could do nothing.

Documentation does not replace remembrance. But it makes remembrance possible — for the families who can now find where their people are, for the historians who can reconstruct what the epidemic produced, and for the public that needs to understand what it means when legal and institutional systems fail the people they are supposed to serve.