New York City’s Hart Island: A Cemetery of Strangers

A few miles from Manhattan there is a parallel New York. Instead off screeching subway trains, dirty-water hotdog stands, granite-and-glass museums and billion dollar skyscrapers, lies a spit of an island home to wide deep common trenches filled with cheap pine coffins. The is Hart Island, a 101-acre sliver of land in the waters north of Manhattan where the tourists never go. It is where New York City has been burying its poor, its paupers and unclaimed dead since 1869. It is estimated that there are now more than a million bodies interred within the soil !

Now as the result of recent advances in DNA and finger print technology we now know who some of these previously anonymous lost souls were including famous actors, actresses, authors, movie directors, and musicians. All are profiled including the strange history of Hart Island in this wonderful audio book.

“A fascinating, richly detailed history of Hart Island, the final destination of lesser-known and sometimes famous New Yorkers. A compelling, rewarding, if sobering investigation that any New Yorker will find deeply enriching”.

– Graham Russell Gao Hodges | George Dorland Langdon, Jr. Professor of History and Africana Studies, Colgate University