New York City's Hart Island

Book excerpt: The story of the nation’s largest mass graveyard and the nearly one million people buried there—based on new documents and advances in DNA technology. Once a Civil War prison and training site and later a psychiatric hospital, among other incarnations, Hart Island, just off the coast of the Bronx in the Long Island Sound, eventually became the repository for New York City’s unclaimed dead. The island’s mass graves are a microcosm of New York history, from the 1822 burial crisis to casualties of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and victims of multiple epidemics. Among the indigent and forgotten, important artists who died in poverty have also been discovered to be interred there, including Disney star Bobby Driscoll and playwright Leo Birinski. In this wide-ranging exploration touching on many aspects of the city’s past, Michael T. Keene reveals the history of New York’s potter’s field—and the stories of some of its lost souls. Includes photographs