TALKING HART ISLAND PODCAST EPISODE 28
Episode 28 “Louisa Van Slyke”: with Author Gail Jarrow. The ship lurched in the heavy North Atlantic swell, its bow plunging deep in the troughs as it pitched sharply, its seasick passengers crammed into its small hold. The young lady, dressed simply, was just another anonymous face in the crowded ship. She kept to herself, […]
TALKING HART ISLAND PODCAST EPISODE 29
Episode 29 “Hebrew Free Burial Society”: with Amy Koplow, Executive Director. While many of the young women and men who perished in the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory Fire could be identified, many could not. As unclaimed or identified deaths, according to New York City policy, bodies were traditionally shipped to the City Morgue at Bellevue […]
TALKING HART ISLAND PODCAST EPISODE 30
Episode 30 “Six to Celebrate” Simeon Bankoff, Executive Director of Historic District Council. In 2017 the annual “Six to Celebrate” initiative from the Historic Districts Council, highlighted six neighborhoods in New York City, in need of preservation attention: Hart Island, the city’s potter’s field which contains the mass grave of over one million people, was […]
TALKING HART ISLAND PODCAST EPISODE 31
Episode 31 “Potters Field(s)”: with Andrew Berman, Executive Director, Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. By the early 1800’s New York City boasted a population of over 200,000, qualifying it as the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. As New York City’s population grew, so did its number of dead. The fact that the number […]
TALKING HART ISLAND PODCAST EPISODE 32
Episode 32 “Boroughs of the Dead”: with Marie Carter, Editor, writer, teacher, and tour guide. When detectives and forensic scientists were called to investigate the Hart Island human remains, found littering its beach, none of them could have known they had been probably treading on additional mass graves, hidden beneath New York City’s parks, buildings, […]
TALKING HART ISLAND PODCAST EPISODE 33
Episode 33 “Angels of Mercy”: with William Seraile, Professor Emeritus, Lehman College, City University of New York. The Colored Orphan Asylum was founded, in New York City in 1836, as the nation’s first orphanage for African American children. The agency weathered three wars, two major financial panics, a devastating fire during the 1863 Draft Riots […]
TALKING HART ISLAND PODCAST EPISODE 34
Episode 34 “Grave Yard of Strangers”: with Norma Jean Gradsky. Leo Birinski was a playwright, screenwriter and director. He worked in Austria-Hungary, Germany and in the United States. Birinski was the screenwriter of many Hollywood productions including, “Song of Song”s starring Marlene Dietrich, “The Lady Has Plans”, starring Paulette Goddard, and perhaps his most famous, […]
TALKING HART ISLAND PODCAST EPISODE 35
Episode 35 “AIDS”: with Michael Bronsky, Professor, Harvard University. On a hot midsummer night in June of 1969, a group of police officers stormed into Greenwich Village’s tiny Stonewall Inn, one of Manhattans early gay and lesbian bars. The patrons of Stonewall revolted. For many this confrontation would eventually become known as the Gay Liberation […]
TALKING HART ISLAND PODCAST EPISODE 36
Episode 36 “Burial Grounds in a Segregated City”: with Tom Angotti, Professor Emertis, Hunter College. During the period of Dutch and English settlement, New York City was one of the nation’s largest urban centers for the slave trade and served as a financial patron, of the plantation economy, in the South. In the Dutch colony, […]
TALKING HART ISLAND PODCAST EPISODE 37
Episode 37 “AIDS-The First Five Years”: with Jean Ashton, Director, New York Historical Society Resources & Programs. It is estimated that during the AIDS epidemic thousands of AIDS victims were buried on Hart Island. Many because they had become disowned by their family and died unclaimed, and many more because there was no one left […]