Нью-Йорктің тарихы мол арал: Харт аралы

Island in New York City

Hart Island, sometimes referred to as Hart's Island, is located at the western end of Long Island Sound, in the northeastern Bronx in New York City. Measuring approximately 1 mile (2 km) long by 0.33 mile (1 km) wide, Hart Island is part of the Pelham Islands archipelago and is east of City Island. The island's first public use was as a training ground for the United States Colored Troops in 1864. Since then, Hart Island has been the location of a Union Civil War prison camp, a psychiatric institution, a tuberculosis sanatorium, a potter's field used for both individual and mass burials, a homeless shelter, a boys' reformatory and workhouse, a jail, and a drug rehabilitation center. Several other structures, such as an amusement park, were planned for Hart Island but not built. During the Cold War, Nike defense missiles were stationed on Hart Island. The island was intermittently used as a prison and a homeless shelter until 1967; the last inhabited structures were abandoned in 1977. The potter's field on Hart Island was run by the New York City Department of Correction until 2019, when the New York City Council voted to transfer jurisdiction to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. The remains of more than one million people are buried on Hart Island, though, since the first decade of the 21st century, there are fewer than 1,500 burials a year. Burials on Hart Island include individuals who were not claimed by their families or did not have private funerals; the homeless and the indigent; and mass burials of disease victims. Access to the island was restricted by the Department of Correction, which operated an infrequent ferryboat service and imposed strict visitation quotas. Burials were conducted by inmates from the nearby Rikers Island jail until 2020 and the COVID 19 pandemic. The Hart Island Project, a public charity founded by visual artist Melinda Hunt, worked to improve access to the island and make burial records more easily available. Transfer to the Parks Department in 2019 had been sought for over twenty years and was hoped to ease public access to the Island. Burials in the island's Potters' Field continued after the transfer.

There are numerous theories about the origins of the island's place name. One theory posits that British cartographers named it "Heart Island" in 1775 due to its organ like shape but the 'e' was dropped shortly after. Another version holds that it was named in reference to deer that migrated from the mainland during periods when ice covered that part of Long Island Sound.

Hart Island is approximately 1 mile (2 km) long by 0.33 mile (1 km) wide at its widest point. It lies about 0.33 mile (1 km) off the eastern shore of City Island. while others state that it is Hart Island is isolated from the rest of the city: there is no electricity and the only means of access is via ferryboat. Pell died in 1669 and ownership passed to his nephew Sir John Pell, the son of British mathematician John Pell. The island remained in the Pell family until 1774, when it was sold to Oliver De Lancey. It was later sold to the Rodman, Haight, and Hunter families, in that order. A steamboat called John Romer shuttled recruits to the island from the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan. A commander's house and a recruits' barracks were built; the barracks included a library and a concert room;

The first burials on Hart Island were those of 20 Union Army soldiers during the American Civil War. On May 27, 1868, New York City purchased the island for $75,000 from Edward Hunter, who also owned the nearby Hunter Island. The cemetery then became known as "City Cemetery" and "Potter's Field". By 1880, The New York Times described the island as "the Green Wood of Five Points", comparing an expansive cemetery in Brooklyn with a historically poor neighborhood in Manhattan. The newspaper also said of Hart Island, "This is where the rough pine boxes go that come from Blackwell's Island", in reference to the influx of corpses being transported from the hospitals on modern day Roosevelt Island. The potter's field on Hart Island replaced two previous potter's fields on the current sites of Washington Square Park and New York Public Library Main Branch in Manhattan. The number of burials on Hart Island exceeded 500,000 by 1958.

Hart Island was used as a quarantine station during the 1870 yellow fever epidemic. In that period, the island contained a women's psychiatric hospital called The Pavilion, which was built 1885, as well as a tubercularium. There was also an industrial school with 300 students on the island. In the late 19th century, Hart Island became the location of a boys' workhouse, which was an extension of the prison and almshouse on Blackwell Island. A workhouse for men was established in 1895, and was followed by a workhouse for young boys ten years later. The prison on Hart Island grew; it had its own band and a Catholic prison chapel. and it was opened the following year. In 1924, John Hunter sold his tract of land on Hart Island's west side to Solomon Riley, a millionaire real estate speculator from Barbados. Riley subsequently proposed to build an amusement park on Hart Island, which would have served the primarily black community of Harlem in Manhattan. and the city condemned the land in 1925. Riley was later paid $144,000 for the seizure.

The prison population of Hart Island was moved to Rikers Island during World War II, and Hart Island's former workhouse was used as a disciplinary barracks by the United States Armed Forces. Rikers Island soon became overcrowded with prisoners. The New York City Board of Estimate approved the construction of a homeless shelter on the island in 1950; it was intended to serve 2,000 people. Residents of nearby City Island opposed the inclusion of the homeless shelter. The New York City Welfare Department closed the homeless shelter and the Department of Correction regained control of the island. A courthouse, which ruled on cases involving the homeless, was opened on Hart Island. The island housed between 1,200 and 1,800 prisoners serving short sentences of between 10 days and two years. In 1956, the island was retrofitted with Nike Ajax missile silos. Battery NY 15, as the silos were known, were part of the United States Army base Fort Slocum from 1956 to 1961 and were operated by the army's 66th Antiaircraft Artillery Missile Battalion. The silos were underground and were powered by large generators. Construction of a new $7 million workhouse on Hart Island to replace the existing facility was announced in 1959. A baseball field was dedicated at the Hart Island prison the following year. It was named Kratter Field, after Marvin Kratter, a businessman who had donated 2,200 seats saved from the demolished Ebbets Field stadium. The island continued to be used as a prison until 1966, when the prison was closed due to changes in the penal code. The center became Phoenix House, which opened in 1967; it quickly grew into a settlement with 350 residents and a vegetable garden. Phoenix House hosted festivals that sometimes attracted crowds of more than 10,000 people. Since then, proposals to re inhabit the island have failed. In 1972, the city considered converting it into a residential resort but the plan was abandoned. An unnamed infant victim of AIDS is buried in the only single grave on Hart Island with a concrete marker that reads SC (special case) B1 (Baby 1) 1985. which was published in 1998. Hunt subsequently founded the Hart Island Project organization in 1994 to help the families and friends of those buried on Hart Island. Another media work, the 2018 documentary One Million American Dreams, documents the history of Hart Island and delves briefly into the lives of various individuals buried there. Prior to the 2022 demolitions, there had been a section of old wooden houses and masonry institutional structures dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but these buildings had fallen into disrepair. Military barracks from the Civil War period were used prior to the construction of a workhouse and of hospital facilities. In the late 2010s, the Hart Island Project and City Island Historical Society started petitioning for Hart Island to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation labeled the island a "site of historical significance" in 2016, given that Hart Island met three of the four criteria for being listed on the NRHP. The island was significantly affected by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and some of the shoreline was eroded, which exposed many of the skeletons buried on the island. Following this, the city announced a restoration of the shoreline. The federal government gave $13.2 million toward the shoreline project in 2015, but the work was delayed for several years. The start of restoration was initially slated for 2020, but in August 2019, the city announced that shoreline work would begin the following month.

Control of the island passed to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (NYC Parks) in December 2019. Burials in the Potters' Field continued after transfer, but they were conducted by city contract workers. In June 2021, the New York City Department of Buildings issued an emergency order authorizing the demolition of eighteen buildings on the island, which the city deemed to be severely deteriorated. Sixteen of these buildings had been identified for demolition in a March 2020 report but, even then, some of these structures were also identified as being easy to repair. The New York City Department of Social Services awarded a $3.3 million contract to JPL Industries in October 2021 for the demolition of the deteriorated structures. and a touchstone memorial on the island was approved the same month. By that year, the city reported having razed and removed 15 of the island's 19 structures. NYC Parks explained that its plans for the island are to create a safer environment for island visitors to visit the island's cemeteries, but not to create a full fledged public park. the largest such in the world, and one of the largest mass graves in the United States. At least 850,000 have been buried on the island, though since the 2000s, the burial rate has declined to fewer than 1,500 a year. According to a 2006 New York Times article, there had been 1,419 burials at the potter's field during the previous year: of these, 826 were adults, 546 were infants and stillborn babies, and 47 were dismembered body parts. >

One third of annual burials are infants and stillborn babies, which has been reduced from a proportion of one half since the Children's Health Insurance Program began to cover all pregnant women in New York State in 1997.

The dead are buried in trenches. Babies are placed in coffins, which are stacked in groups of 100, measuring five coffins deep and usually in twenty rows. There are seven sizes of coffins, which range from long. Each box is labeled with an identification number, the person's age, ethnicity, and the place where the body was found, if applicable. Prior to civilian contractors doing the actual burials which began in 2020, inmates from the nearby Rikers Island jail were paid fifty cents an hour to bury bodies on Hart Island. Burial records on microfilm at the Municipal Archives indicate that until 1913, burials of unknowns were in single plots, and identified adults and children were buried in mass graves. In 1913, the trenches were separated to facilitate the more frequent disinterment of adults. Coffins are stacked three deep with 150 coffins assigned to each plot, and marked with GPS coordinates. and was dedicated in October 1948.

Hart Island has also been used for burials of disease victims during epidemics and pandemics. During the COVID 19 pandemic in New York City, Hart Island was designated as the temporary burial site for people who had died from COVID 19 if deaths overwhelmed the capacity of mortuaries. At the time, deaths at home within the city had increased significantly, though the corpses were not tested for COVID 19. Preparations for mass graves began at the end of March 2020, Although several media sources reported in April 2020 that burials had begun, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio clarified that Hart Island was only being used to bury unclaimed corpses, as well as the bodies of those who chose it as a burial place. In 2021, the website The City published an analysis that found there was a sharp increase in the number of interments between 2019, when 846 corpses were buried on the island, and 2020, when 2,334 corpses were buried.

Many burial records were destroyed by arson in late July 1977. Remaining records of burials before 1977 were transferred to the Municipal Archives in Manhattan; while records after that date are still kept in handwritten ledgers, these are now transcribed into a digital database that is partially available online. A Freedom of Information Act (FOI) request for 50,000 burial records was granted to the Hart Island Project in 2008. A lawsuit, concerning "place of death" information redacted from the Hart Island burial records, was filed against New York City's government in July 2008 and was settled out of court in January 2009.

Those interred on Hart Island are not necessarily homeless or indigent. Many of the dead either had families who could not afford the expenses of private funerals or were not claimed by relatives within a month of death. Notable burials include the playwright, film screenwriter, and director Leo Birinski, who was buried there in 1951 after dying alone and in poverty, The American novelist Dawn Powell was buried on Hart Island in 1970, five years after her death, after her remains had been used for medical studies and the executor of her estate refused to reclaim them. Academy Award winner Bobby Driscoll, who was found dead in 1968 in an East Village tenement, was buried on Hart Island because his remains could not be identified in a timely fashion. T Bone Slim, the labor activist, songwriter, and Wobbly, was buried on Hart Island after his body was found floating in the Hudson River. The composer Noah Creshevsky was interred on Hart Island at his own request because, according to his husband David Sachs, Creshevsky wanted to protest the trappings and cost of traditional funerals.

Founded by New York artist Melinda Hunt in 1994, the Hart Island Project is a nonprofit organization devoted to improving access to the island and its burial data. Historian Thomas Laqueur writes:

Woody Guthrie's song about the unnamed Mexican migrant dead has had a long resonant history. Hunt, in an emotionally related gesture, has researched, for years, in order to publish the names of as many as 850,000 paupers who lie in 101 acres of Hart Island where the city buries its anonymous dead. Since 2009, the city has given burial records for the island to the Hart Island Project. In turn, the organization maintains an online database of burial records from 1980 onward. The project has led to reforms of access to Hart Island such as opening the island monthly to everyone and legislation that requires the Department of Correction to publish burial records online. The Hart Island Project has digitally mapped grave trenches using Global Positioning System (GPS) data. In 2014, an interactive map with GPS burial data and storytelling software, "clocks of anonymity" was released as the "Traveling Cloud Museum", which collects publicly submitted stories of those who are listed in the burial records. In 2012, Westchester Community College hosted an art exhibition of people whose graves were located through the Hart Island Project with Hunt's help. The Hart Island Project also collaborated with British landscape architects Ann Sharrock and Ian Fisher to present a landscape strategy to the New York City Council and the Parks Department.

On October 28, 2011, the New York City Council Committee on Fire and Criminal Justice held a hearing titled "Oversight: Examining the Operation of Potter's Field by the N. Y. C., Department of Correction on Hart Island". Legislation passed in 2013 requires the Department of Correction to make two sets of documents available on the Internet: a database of burials and a visitation policy. In April 2013, the Department of Correction published an online database of burials on the island. The Hart Island Project testified in favor of this bill on September 27, 2012, but the bill was not passed. The bill was reintroduced in March 2014, The bill ultimately failed because neither the Parks Department nor the Department of Correction supported the move. The Parks Department stated that the operation of an active cemetery was outside its purview while the Department of Correction preferred that another city agency take control of Hart Island. In 2018, City Council member Ydanis Rodríguez and three colleagues re introduced the bill a second time. In supporting the bill, Rodriguez stated that he wanted relatives of Hart Island's deceased to be able to access their loved ones' graves. The bill was passed in the New York City Council in November 2019, with most council members voting in favor of transferring jurisdiction to the Parks Department. The following month, mayor Bill de Blasio signed the legislation, as well as three other bills, including one that would allow the ferry service to be operated by the New York City Department of Transportation.

The only access to Hart Island is by ferryboat. The city government allows family members to visit the island and leave mementos at grave sites, and maintains an online and telephone system for family members to schedule grave site visits. Other members of the public are permitted to visit by prior appointment only.

The city formerly operated a 24/7 ferry service between City and Hart islands, which ran every forty five minutes during the day and less frequently at night. The service was extremely expensive to operate; in 1967, about 1,500 people per month used the service and the city spent $300,000 per year to keep it running. By 1977, the city had discontinued frequent ferry service and provided seven trips a day. Under legislation enacted in 2019, the New York City Department of Transportation was to operate the ferry at a higher frequency. The first visit took place on July 19, 2015. Visits to individual graves, which take place twice a month, are restricted to individuals who had a close relationship with the deceased. Monthly guided visits to Hart Island's gazebo were available to the general public. During the COVID 19 pandemic, the public was not allowed to visit Hart Island; though visits resumed in May 2021, the number of visitors allowed on each ferry trip was decreased to ten.

In July 2021, responsibility for the island was finally fully transferred from the Department of Correction to NYC Parks. As part of the Hart Island Transportation Study, which sought to improve access to the island, NYC Parks conducted public meetings in early 2022. Four alternatives were presented: a shuttle bus service from Orchard Beach to the Fordham Street ferry pier; a shuttle bus service from the New York City Subway's Pelham Bay Park station, stopping at Orchard Beach and Fordham Street; a new ferry service from Ferry Point Park to the island; and an extension of NYC Ferry's Soundview route from Ferry Point Park to the island. The New York City Parks Department has explained that its plans for the island are to create a safer environment for cemetery and island visitors, but not to create a full fledged public park.