An artist’s Brief But Spectacular take on New York City’s family tomb

John Yang:

New York City's Hart Island sits between the Bronx and Long Island. It's home to the city's potter's field, the final resting place for more than a million unclaimed bodies. In 2018 artists Melinda Hunt launched the Hart Island Project. She's mapped the entire island and posted online profiles for more than 68,000 people buried there. Her goal is to tell the stories of the forgotten and perhaps give closure to their families. Tonight, Hunt shares her Brief But Spectacular take on New York City's family tomb.

Melinda Hunt, President, The Hart Island Project:

Hart Island was part of New York City before the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens or Staten Island, and it was purchased in 1868 by the city of New York, and soon after, they began burying unclaimed bodies there, its mass graves, but it's really more common graves that are a highly organized grid that allows the city to quickly bury numbers of bodies during periods of epidemics or disasters most recently COVID-19.

For the most part, people who are buried on Hart Island are identified and they are with family permission. It has disproportionately low income people of color, but it's also a lot of infants, immigrants, victims of disease and victims of crime. A city burial in New York City is actually a green burial. In New York City, there are no other affordable green burial options.

So it's actually a very good choice. My first visit was November 1991. I was there to begin working on a documentary book with photographer Joel Sternfeld. And from that experience, I became really interested over the years in helping the public to gain access to Hart Island.

After the book came out in 1998, families started contacting me for assistance to visit. I realized how difficult it was for families to even get access to records of their relative being buried there. Vicki Pavia reached out and said that she wanted to visit Hart Island for the 40th anniversary of the death of her baby Denise. So she was the first family member that I ever took to Hart Island in 1994.

Starting in 2009, working with Volunteers, we created an online database of burials and people were finding their relatives they would send me stories. And I felt that these stories should really be available to other people.

The Traveling Cloud Museum is a social media platform that allows people to tell stories that they've carried around for a long time and not had an opportunity to tell before. When you go into the profile of that person, you are invited to add a story and once you add a story, it essentially stops the clock of anonymity and pulls them back into the historic record.

And so my effort with the Hart Island Project is really to reconnect city cemetery with New York City through storytelling. My name is Melinda Hunt and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on New York City's family too.

John Yang:

You can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos online at pbs.org/newshour/brief.