Weird Places in the US - Hart Island

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Hart Island is the location of the 131-acre (0.53 km2) public cemetery for New York City, the largest tax-funded cemetery in the world.[16][17][18] The name Potter's Field officially retired on Wards Island and Hart Island opened with the name City Cemetery, although the new burial ground is often referred to as "potters field." Burials on Hart Island began with 20 Union Soldiers during the American Civil War. City burials started shortly after Hart Island was sold to New York City in 1868.[2] In 1869, the city buried a 24-year-old woman named Louisa Van Slyke who died in the Charity Hospital and was the first person to be buried in the island's 45-acre (180,000 m2) public graveyard.[19][20] Up until 1989, City Cemetery occupied 45-acres on the northern half of Hart Island. The island’s southern end continued to accommodate the living up until the AIDS epidemic when sixteen bodies were buried at the southern tip of Hart Island before 1985. At various times Hart has been home to an asylum, a sanitarium, a prison workhouse and, during the Cold War, Nike defense missiles.[21] Burials of unknowns were in single plots, and identified adults and children were buried in mass graves.[22][23] In 1913, adults and children under five were buried in separate mass graves. Unknowns are mostly adults. They are frequently disinterred when families are able to locate their relatives through DNA, photographs and fingerprints kept on file at the Office of the Medical Examiner. Adults are buried in trenches with three sections of 48-50 individuals to make disinterment easier. Children, mostly infants, are rarely disinterred and are buried in trenches of 1,000.

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More than one million dead are buried on the island—now fewer than 1,500 a year. One third of them are infants and stillborn babies – which has been reduced from one half since children's health insurance began to cover all pregnant women in New York State

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At various times during its history, Hart Island has had a workhouse, a hospital, prisons, a Civil War internment camp, a reformatory and a Nike missile base. The island's area is 0.531 km² (0.205 sq mi, or 131.22 acres) and had no permanent population as of the 2000 census. Currently it serves as the city's potter's field and is run by the New York City Department of Correction. The first public use of Hart Island was to train United States Colored Troops beginning in 1864.

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