New York’s potter’s field became an unlikely savior during the coronavirus crisis — more than quintupling its usual pace of burials during the height of the pandemic, new stats show.
With funeral homes and morgues overflowing with corpses as the disease ravaged the city, Hart Island took 894 bodies between March 9 and Friday.
All of last year, the 131-acre public cemetery saw about 1,100 burials, or roughly 21 per week, according to the city Department of Corrections, which oversees internments on the island off the Bronx coast.
During the week of April 6, at the peak of the pandemic, the island handled 138 burials.
Inmates clad in white jumpsuits could be seen stacking plain wood coffins in mass graves in a drone video shot in early April by the nonprofit Hart Island Project.
By April 6, the city stopped using prisoners to bury the dead because of social-distancing concerns. A private landscaping firm was instead hired for the grim task, at a cost of about $320,000 through May 22, City Hall said.
The city stored some remains in a morgue in Sunset Park — to give loved ones more time to choose a final resting place, it said, but the medical examiner’s office wouldn’t say how many.
“This is a personal decision made by families to ensure they are able to bury their loved ones in the way that is most meaningful to then,” said City Hall spokeswoman Avery Cohen.
Burial on the island should not be viewed “as a shameful thing,” said Melinda Hunt, the president of The Hart Island Project, which maintains a database of burials on the island.
“Now that prisoners aren’t involved in it, I think a city burial is a really good choice. It’s way more secure than an overwhelmed funeral director,” Hunt said.
Several funeral homes in the city were seen storing corpses outside in the open, or in unrefrigerated trucks.
Hart Island isn’t always the final resting place for its inhabitants. Bodies can be exhumed — something that happens about 40 times a year.
The city is providing $1,700 toward burial expenses for the poor who don’t want a Hart Island burial.