Original subtitles

Bernstein: I first heard about Hart Island

when I was working on a story about a formerly homeless man.

He had lived in the tunnels

underneath Penn Station, I think.

There was a photographer who photographed his little --

the little house he had made himself there.

And because of her work, he had been rescued,

he'd been given a home,

and then he'd been found dead in that home.

And he was going to go to Hart Island.

And it was -- there was such sadness at the idea

that this man who had finally achieved a home of his own

was going to be dispossessed --

was going to be one of the multitude

in these anonymous graves.

[Siren wailing in distance]

♪♪

I'm a New Yorker, and I believe

that New York is more than,

you know, the old idea of the city on the hill.

New York is really what America is about.

♪♪

And there is a tragedy inherent in a big metropolis.

There are all these stories of the chance gone by,

the mistakes, the bad childhood,

bad choices, or just bad luck.

That's something that any great metropolis contends with.

♪♪

But there's something more here --

that you could have a loving family,

a career, money set aside.

♪♪

And you could still end up in a mass grave

on an island off-limits to the public

buried by inmates paid 50 cents an hour.

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[Siren wailing]

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Rockwell: "The wind rises in from the sound

carrying the clang of the bell buoy from nearby City Island,

tolling its fitful warning."

[Bell clanging]

♪♪

"All around is desolate and sad,

no kind hand to decorate these graves

with trophies of love and remembrance."

♪♪

"Not even a headstone to show where is interred

what was once a human being."

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Lacquer: I think people have understood since Roman antiquity

that cities eat many of their inhabitants.

The word "potter's field," after all, is biblical,

but it really means a place,

an industrial area where we used to dig clay,

and that's where you put the bodies that the city ate up.

Every city has a place for the burying of the poor.

Hart Island is, like everything in New York,

sort of bigger and grander

and slightly grungier. [Chuckles]

So in that sense, Hart Island represents,

you know, a city which spat out a million people.

♪♪

Czitrom: We must always value the individual life,

particularly in a city like New York,

where too often, we reduce people

to teeming masses, immigrants,

the refuse of the world.

They make us forget sometimes

that behind every one of those bodies at Hart Island

was a lived life, aspirations, loved ones.

It seems to me that that all those million-plus folks

buried in Hart Island offer us a kind of record

of lived life in New York City,

in many cases anonymous.

In many cases, the people are unknown.

In many cases, we know very little

about the people buried there.

Nonetheless, these lives matter, and they mattered.

[Bell clanging]

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[Ferrer speaking Spanish]

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De Jesus: My baby was already sick, so I already knew

that there was a 50/50 chance of him living or dying.

[Child speaks indistinctly]

Gave birth to him.

I didn't have the financial

to be able to bury him and stuff.

So the hospital gave me a week

for me to, you know, collect the money.

I went to the welfare day after day, day after day

the entire week that I was given,

and they said no.

And at that point, I didn't know my real mother.

I didn't know my real family.

So it was like, I really didn't have nobody.

I was alone out here living actually literally alone.

I can't be ungrateful,

because me living under public assistance, New York City,

has been helping my children a lot.

But when it comes to my son, they failed me completely,

because I put all my trust on them.

I put my child's body in their hands to bury him.

You know, it's not the way I wanted.

But I figure at least he's going to be buried.

He'll be a peace. But he's -- He wasn't.

♪♪

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Czitrom: Well, when Hart Island is opened,

New York is on the cusp of yet another enormous rush of growth.

The city's population basically doubled every 20 years.

♪♪

New York City is the commercial capital of America.

It's the center of its publishing industry.

It's the center of fashion.

And, of course, next to the glitz,

next to the glamor, next to the mansions being built

by A.T. Stewart or the Vanderbilts,

you have the reality of The Five Points, the slums,

the very, very difficult lives lived by most New Yorkers --

that is to say the working class and the poor.

♪♪

New York is forced to create a whole series of institutions

to deal with the realities of tens of thousands of immigrants

coming into the city continually.

There was a sense, I think,

that these people needed to be separated out,

that people were not comfortable seeing the insane,

seeing the paupers, seeing elderly alcoholics

on the streets of New York.

And many of these institutions --

prisons, lunatic asylums, hospitals,

all were erected and created outside Manhattan

on these islands in the East River.

♪♪

Sante: There was Welfare Island,

there were the Quarantine Islands,

and, of course, Ellis Island.

And these were all various processing stations.

Hart Island was the terminal island.

So, this archipelago that New York City is

it is sort of part of the great digestive system

of the metropolis.

♪♪

There's this perpetually renewing population

of people who come for an opportunity

or because they're fleeing something

or because they want to reinvent themselves,

who wash up in New York,

and perhaps, they do not find a way of "making it."

And so they exist on the fringes.

♪♪

New York has had to, you know, just out of necessity,

cultivate this kind of indifference.

This is something that all great cities

have in common to one degree or another,

but New York City is an exaggeration of this process.

♪♪

Czitrom: In the 1890s, early 1900s,

every spring, the police department

would have to fish out scores and scores of bodies

that floated to the surface on the harbor or in the rivers.

What do you do with these bodies?

Most of them, totally anonymous.

These folks went to Hart Island.

This is a place that New York has to have

to service the reality of death.

♪♪

Bernstein: I think New Yorkers understand

that there are always going to be inequalities in the city,

huge inequalities, and they're in very sharp focus.

But in death, we're equal.

We all die alone.

[Sirens wailing in distance]

♪♪

In today's world, you have so many families who are estranged

or just lost to each other by distance, by misfortune.

♪♪

And yet to know that someone you once loved

or that you hoped loved you

is buried in a mass grave on Hart Island,

that resonates forever.

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[Ferrer speaking Spanish]

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Hanson: We got married in 1982

and got married at my sister's house

'cause I never wanted a big wedding.

I was never the one to be in front of --

you know, wear a dress and have all these people

that, you know, sometimes you don't even know half of them.

Why would you want them there at your wedding?

But there were a lot of great times with with Bruce, a lot.

♪♪

And when he started spiraling down,

that was in 84,

we moved right next to a bar called Lady L's.

We used to go to Lady L's on on Friday nights,

got a babysitter for Kimberly.

And he started hanging out with a lot of different people

and started drinking heavily.

And the bar was right next door,

which was not the greatest thing,

Didn't think anything of it when we moved to the house.

But it happened, and...

♪♪

I remember vodka bottles being under the bed hidden,

you know, so -- And they would argue constantly,

so I just remember my childhood not wonderful.

♪♪

You know, I think that he hurt his back at work,

and he got addicted to pain medication

and then cocaine, then alcohol, and he just spiraled downhill.

♪♪

Hanson: A lot of times at night, I wouldn't stay home.

I would sleep over my girlfriend's house

with the dog and, of course, my daughter.

And my mother called up one night,

and I wasn't there yet 'cause I stayed at Eileen's house.

And my mom said, "What kind of a --

What kind of a daughter are you?

You don't come home at night? What is wrong with you?"

And I broke -- I broke down in tears, because now they knew.

Now my secret is coming out.

[Siren wailing]

♪♪

He was better off out of the picture

if he couldn't be straight,

because it would just hurt her, would hurt her too much.

If you're in a relationship, you have to be "us,"

has to be family. If it's not family,

it's not a relationship. It's not love. It's not there.

[Car horn blares]

[Whistle blows]

Bradshaw: He would always enter my conscience.

I would always wonder, is he okay?

What is he doing? Is he living on the streets?

Even when I would go to Manhattan when I was younger,

I would always wonder if that was him.

You know, I'd always want to give money to those people

'cause I felt like that was my dad.

Like, I hoped, which people don't hope,

that he was either in the hospital or in jail,

where I would get that one moment that he was sober.

And I never got it.

And the fact that he was in a hospital

and nobody contacted any family members

and then hid his body for three years is crazy.

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Sweat: So, in the world today, everyone knows America

as the land of freedom and opportunity,

because you see me in front of you now.

But prior to seeing me here,

you didn't know of me, except for one thing.

"He is less than a man.

He is not America.

He is the slave that built America."

♪♪

This is the twosome of every man and woman of color.

Now, we at the point

when we stumble upon a part of history

that doencounter us as a people of color,

of honor, of respect.

♪♪

[Man shouting indistinctly in distance]

♪♪

Hart and Rikers Island at the time of 1860

was being converted into Camp Astor.

♪♪

There was mustered in

over 200,000 soldiers of color.

♪♪

America was not America at that time.

It was Confederacy in the South and the Union up in the North,

and what brought us together was the Civil War.

♪♪

If it wasn't for these men, we would not be free today.

If it wasn't for those United States colored troops,

we would not be as proud as we are today.

[Cheers and applause in distance]

♪♪

United States colored troops were definitely on that island.

And there still are certain little indications

that there are so few bodies that still remain.

♪♪

And in us knocking at the door, who is there to open it?

A correctional department.

I've never so been humiliated

that to have a correction officer direct me in prayer.

♪♪

Hunt: When the burials began in 1869,

the Department of Charities and Correction was one city agency.

And what happened more recently

was the Department of Welfare pulled out of Hart Island

and left the Department of Correction

in charge of these burials.

♪♪

So, it used to be that there was a dead house

at the end of 26th Street and a dock,

and in the dead house, the bodies which were unclaimed

were put in these boxes and then put onto a boat.

There were two steamships. One was called Hope[Chuckles]

and the other was called Fidelity.

♪♪

Rockwell: "The boat backs up to the dead house

and takes the coffins with their ghastly freight.

They're shoved rudely down a slide

like the various merchandise.

And as they strike the deck,

we hear the thud of the body and its rude receptacle."

♪♪

"'Business is good today,' the Charon of the Styx says.

As we count the coffins heaped up promiscuously,

we think so, too."

♪♪

"We steam away and soon touch at Blackwell's Island.

Here, the bodies of those who died of smallpox

and other contagious diseases are taken on-board.

Charity Hospital is also visited and contributes its quota."

♪♪

"The coffins are bundled out

to men who cart them away into a field,

handling them as rudely as baggage masters

to trucks at a depot.

Trenches are about 15 feet deep and 6 feet wide.

The coffins are piled up like wood and cords

or fuel in a coal pit, 13 deep.

As soon as the coffin is placed at the bottom of the trench,

a barrow of dirt is thrown over it

and another coffin placed above.

Children's coffins are chucked in at the feet of the others

and help to form a solid mass.

A foot of earth is then thrown upon the upper one

until the work is completed."

♪♪

"Thus all nationalities rest close together.

The murderer is a close companion of the thief

and the suicide is just beneath the pauper.

There is no aristocracy."

♪♪

Hunt: I first heard of Hart Island

from a physician

who was at Harlem Hospital.

And she was talking about

infants that were born addicted to crack

and that they were buried in shoeboxes

1,000 at a time on Hart Island.

And at that time, Hart Island was open to journalists

and to academics,

and so I decided that I was just going to get there.

And it just so happened that that day was the very first day

that these inmates had ever been on Hart Island.

And these were young men convicted of misdemeanors

like turnstile jumping, graffiti.

So, you know, they're not felons or anything like that.

They're young men that couldn't afford a good lawyer.

Rodriguez: Oh, I used to live in Red Hook.

That was one of the bad neighborhoods

by the Battery Tunnel in Brooklyn.

And New York City, and it was crazy in '89.

It was crack and stuff like that.

And we used to sell weed and drugs and stuff like that.

And I wind up getting caught with possession,

and I win up going to Rikers Island

for a little bit of time.

♪♪

In those days, it was it was a zoo.

You could get anything. You could get a knife or anything.

One guy -- One time, the guy had a gun in there.

It was like -- like gladiator school every day.

And so when I got short --

Short means that you're going home.

You don't have a lot of time left in your sentence --

They gave me a job in Hart Island.

♪♪

Next thing you know, they put some shackles on you,

and they take you on a little bus,

and then they take you on a boat.

I'm a little scared 'cause I'm in handcuffs.

I'm on the boat thinking the boat's going to go down.

I think the worst or whatever.

And they take you to Hart Island.

And I still didn't know that Hart Island was potter's field.

I heard of potter's field in movies and stuff like that,

but I didn't -- I didn't even know what -- what it meant.

And there's only two officers. No fence, no nothing.

And there was this smell. I don't know what the smell was.

So, the next morning, it's raining, and they tell you,

"We're going to go -- We're going to go to work."

♪♪

We walk to this big hallway, but it was graves,

and there were mass graves with wooden boxes,

and we're going to move them to put more boxes in there.

And the people that were there are John Does

or people that nobody wants to pay for

or people that get lost in the system.

They were like five deep. It was a big hole.

There were little coffins in the grave,

and the guys would all talk about them,

and they would just say crack babies,

even though who knows what they were there for.

But that's the mentality they had.

that those were, like, undesirables or whatever,

that they didn't count or whatever.

♪♪

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Crowley: When our mayor took office, he was elected

because of his campaign

on our city being a tale of two cities,

the haves and the have-nots.

And those who have not

are usually the ones who wind up being buried on Hart Island.

♪♪

The difficulty in government, especially when you're the mayor

and you're managing a very large city,

the priorities of the public take shape

and become the most important issues you address.

And not many people bring Hart Island

to elected officials' attentions.

♪♪

It is out of sight and out of mind to so many New Yorkers.

People just don't care that much

unless they have a personal connection.

It shouldn't be so removed from the rest of the city.

We should know what happens after people die.

We should be able to see that space.

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Levine: The fact that we're using inmates

to maintain this active burial site

where one million souls are buried,

where so much of New York City history is buried,

is -- is Dickensian.

And it is a document of the inequality

that has existed in this city for centuries.

Dunn: I don't think the state is unique in this respect.

If you're poor in this world or you're not powerful,

you get forgotten pretty quickly.

And Hart Island is exactly where our society and our country

puts the people who are poor and forgotten.

♪♪

And you have, you know, a situation you couldn't make up

in which you have the poor and forgotten people

who are alive and are in jail

who are bearing the poor and forgotten people who are dead.

♪♪

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[Ferrer speaking Spanish]

Bernstein: The case of Ciro Ferrer,

this man who came here from Havana,

when I talked to his daughter,

she said he was a -- he was a good father.

He -- He really went to support them.

They spoke. There were photographs sent back

and then suddenly silence.

He had been found wandering in the street

near the apartment where he lived alone.

He had dementia. He was placed in a nursing home.

He told a court evaluator

that he had a wife and children in Cuba.

And yet the court-appointed guardian,

who was collecting $400 a month from his Social Security

and giving the rest to the nursing home,

never contacted them.

Man: [Through intercom] Hello?

Hola. Español?

Yes.

Uh... [Speaking Spanish]

Okay, no problem.

[Women conversing in Spanish]

Sí.

[Both laugh]

♪♪

[Laughs]

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De Jesus: I was sitting one day

with my friend in her living room,

and we had started speaking about him again.

And I was like, "Wow, my baby --

It's going to be 12 years."

And she was like,

"Where was it that -- that the city buried him again?"

I'm like, "Honestly, I really don't know.

The only thing that I know is Hart Island."

I went back to the hospital where I gave birth,

and they were like, "Yeah,

but you have to communicate with the correctional facility."

I called, and the lady that I spoke to,

she was like, "Yes," that the baby was there.

[Sniffing sharply]

You have to sit there and wait for police officers

to actually open the gate and let you in.

They actually make you sign papers

before you even get on the ferry.

I'm like, okay.

What can I do if the Department of Corrections,

they gonna treat us like if we visiting a jail?

♪♪

But once the captain got close to us

and asked me, "Did anybody notify you?"

I'm like, "Notify me about what?"

And that's when he gave me the news,

"We can't find your child here."

I'm like -- I... just broke down right there.

My daughter -- My oldest daughter, she broke down crying.

♪♪

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[Children chattering in distance]

♪♪

"If he's not there, where he at, Mommy?"

♪♪

Every day, they ask.

"Did you speak to the lawyer?

Did -- Did they found Anthony?"

♪♪

"Are we gonna finally go visit Anthony?"

I'm like, "No, we -- we have to sit down and wait.

It's out of my hands now.

Now we just have to wait and see where is Anthony at."

♪♪

Every time I call, there's different people

that answer the phone.

All they keep telling me is that there's a check-in

when they brought my baby in, but there's no check-out.

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Where he at? What they did to his body?

♪♪

You know, how can the city just lose a tiny body?

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How is that it's not possible?

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Rockwell: "Long ago, it was said that one half of the world

does not know how the other half lives.

That was true then.

It did not know because it did not care."

♪♪

"The half that was on top cared little for the struggles

and less for the fate of those who were underneath,

so long as it was able to hold them there

and keep its own seat."

♪♪

"In New York, the youngest of the world's great cities,

that time came later than elsewhere."

♪♪

Yochelson: Riis was a Danish immigrant who came to America

at the age of 20 in 1870,

spent 5 years as a homeless person,

and then worked as a newspaper reporter for 23 years

covering the slums.

♪♪

He was immersing himself in the worst,

most frightening, demoralizing part

of New York City's life.

And he had the brilliant idea of using photographs

to give people an image that went with his words.

So this is really the beginning

of what we would understand as photojournalism.

♪♪

Czitrom: Riis had been a police reporter for many years

before he took photographs.

And as a police reporter,

he was assigned to go with the NYPD

to do all these things that cops had to do in those days.

It was not so much about fighting crime

as it was being a kind of social service agency for the city.

♪♪

Cops had to fish out dead bodies from the rivers and the harbors.

Cops had to help wash children.

Cops were helping to give vaccinations in the tenements.

So Riis, by reporting on the police,

got a tremendous education in the underside of New York life.

Now, the title of his most famous book,

"How the Other Half Lives," is actually a kind of ironic joke.

A more accurate title would have been

"How the Other 3/4 Lives."

Yochelson: "How the Other Half Lives" was a tour of the slums

in which he used everything he knew about this neighborhood

that he'd spent over 10 years reporting on

and describing in very colorful language

this way of life unknown to his audience,

which was essentially a middle-class audience.

♪♪

This was not really someone very concerned with composing images,

in large part because of the very primitive camera

that he was using,

where he would come into a crowded lodging house

when people were sleeping and set off a gun, actually,

literally a gun with the flash powder

and create a big boom and wake people up and capture them.

♪♪

I mean, it's not at all respectful of his subjects

in the pictures,

and that's exactly what they convey,

which is the indignity of their lives.

♪♪

This tour really ends at Hart Island

because it's a really critical subject for his story.

It's the climax of his story.

In a chapter called "The Common Herd,"

he describes the end of their lives in this way.

♪♪

"One free excursion awaits young and old,

whom bitter poverty has denied the poor privilege

of the choice of the home in death

they were denied in life.

The ride up the sound to the potter's field,

charitably styled the city cemetery.

But even there, they do not escape their fate.

In the common trench of the poor burying ground,

they lay packed three stories deep shoulder to shoulder,

crowded in death as they were in life."

♪♪

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Woman: [In distance] To the Creator, to the initiator of life,

Father, we first reverence and hallow Your name.

♪♪

Lord, we're here this day to give honor

and to commemorate all of those women and men

who sacrificed their lives so that we can have life,

so that we can walk around this nation, this planet,

in hope, so that we could have freedom.

We honor them this day. Amen.

-Amen. -Amen.

[Applause]

♪♪

Sweat: There's a legend about people that grow up in Brooklyn,

that we're very strong stock.

We're very straightforward,

and we're people that have resources.

My resource has always been my family.

As I grew up, I went through

all of the racial discriminatory situations

that the world knows of today that happened in America.

I have learned the humiliation of being that man.

♪♪

The Civil War freed the slaves.

Vietnam was my civil war.

♪♪

It's the first place I ever felt whole as a man.

It's the first place in my life

that I ever met a man of my opposite color

that was true to heart and soul about life and death with me.

♪♪

His name was Richard.

He's gone and been gone since he was 19 years old.

Was our machine gunner.

He is that boy from Arkansas

who taught me of white and black love.

Man becomes family with man with war.

Comradeship, we call it.

♪♪

During my trial of warriorship,

my wife was 17 years old

and pregnant with my second pregnancy.

♪♪

She gave birth in St. Albans Naval Hospital.

And when I got back to the United States of America,

I had no knowledge how to handle any of this type of a business.

♪♪

So when it was exposed to me that it was twins,

I didn't even question where the other one was

when they only showed me one.

♪♪

Now, that's a pivotal point

because she's never spoken to me about it.

That's because of our immaturity,

our guilt with the situation.

Everyone in the world knows

no one wants to bury their family on a potter's field.

Who should have to go there?

♪♪

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[Children chattering in distance]

♪♪

Bradshaw: I have a family video,

an old one, and he's in it.

♪♪

And sometimes I'll just replay that,

just to know that he did care at any time.

♪♪

You know, the things that I remember about him,

the majority was good things.

♪♪

The majority that I remember from him

was that he tried to be... around and there and...

you know, a good of a person as he could.

But drugs and alcohol just took over.

She said, "Do you think he'd ever come around?"

I said, "I don't know, Kim. I don't know."

I said, "He's always welcome as long as he's straight.

If he's straight, he's more than welcome."

[Indistinct conversations in distance]

Then she got to the point where she's 16.

"I want to see my daddy. I really want to see him.

Don't you think you can find him?"

I said, "You know what, Kim? I'll do my best.

I'll try to find him."

So I called the bars where he hung out

and his friends hung out.

He had one friend. His name was Pete Torres.

I left my phone number with the bartender,

and I said, "Listen, if Pete comes in or Bruce comes in

or any one of his friends come in, have him call me,

'cause Kim really, really wants to see him.

She wants to see her daddy."

♪♪

We're on Seaside Heights when we met Bruce.

He was happy to see -- see Kimberly.

He's happy to see -- see me.

He wore long sleeves,

and she knew he was doing drugs.

She could tell that.

But they had -- they had a really good time.

He won a TV set for her.

And she was, like, ecstatic and said, "Oh, Daddy,

make sure you call me again. I want to see you again.

This is -- You know, this is good

that we could get together."

"I will always have him in my life now.

I have a connection to him. I can call this cellphone.

And, you know, whether --" It didn't matter to me

that he was a drug addict. I just wanted him in my life.

So the fact that it was disconnected the next day...

broke my heart.

Hanson: I think he always wanted

to have some kind of relationship with Kim.

He didn't want to lose it, but he couldn't control himself.

He had a -- He had the devil in him when he was born,

I guess, and it was hard to fight it.

And Kim always wanted closure.

She always wanted -- She always said to me,

from, I guess, 16 all the way until she is now,

that she said, "I know,

I know deep down inside, I'll always talk to him.

I'll always be able to tell him my piece of this story."

And one day, we get a phone call,

and the New York Times are calling us up

and this woman, Nina Bernstein.

And Nina said to me,

"Do you know -- Are you related to Bruce Hanson?"

I said, "Yeah, that's my ex-husband."

And she said, "Well, I have to tell you something."

Bernstein: It was really shocking to me

to discover that New York state law,

a law dating back to the 19th century,

required the city to offer the bodies of unclaimed dead

to medical schools for dissection.

♪♪

I learned that there were 22 cadavers

that were in cold storage at Albert Einstein Medical School.

♪♪

You know, basically, the-- these cadavers

are just lent to the medical schools.

They are supposed to then be returned to the city

for what the city considers proper burial,

which is a Hart Island trench.

♪♪

I tried very hard to learn the names of these cadavers

because I wanted to reclaim their stories.

One of the last of the 22 that day was Bruce Hanson.

♪♪

Even though his body had been in cold storage for three years,

it had been on lists sent back and forth

between the medical school and the medical examiner's office.

The medical examiner's office had not done the first thing

in terms of trying to find someone

who knew Bruce Hanson and would care.

And it was easy.

♪♪

Their job is to be the last

and most important source of information about this person.

♪♪

They had his name.

They had his name when he first arrived to the morgue.

They had his name when they put him on a list

to offer as a cadaver for dissection at medical school.

♪♪

When I had the name and I did the first basic search,

it -- it came up immediately,

his ex-wife in New Jersey.

One phone call, and I had her.

One phone call, and I was --

She was carrying the phone to her daughter.

♪♪

Hanson: Nobody called us. I never changed my last name.

It's still Hanson. I live in the same state as New Jersey.

Nina had no problem calling me up to find out.

♪♪

He shouldn't have ended up in there.

They shouldn't allow that.

♪♪

And for three years being in Albert Einstein hospital,

just...you know, going through their medical procedures

for three years, putting him in a cold box,

pulling him out, cutting him up, putting --

It's awful. It's --

It's awful.

Bradshaw: I'm angry at how it happened.

I'm angry with the medical examiner,

the hospital,

the people, you know, that still won't

give me information on him.

You know, it's my father.

I should have a right to know how he died.

I'm never going to find out.

♪♪

♪♪

The medical examiner's office calling

to find out what you know,

the hospital not giving -- giving you a hard time

about getting the records.

Everybody's hiding something.

♪♪

So the hospital's working with the medical examiner,

which is working with Hart Island.

You know, they obviously don't want people to know

most of the mistakes that they made

or things that they just didn't care about.

Think about all those bums on the street.

You think they contacted every single person's family?

They throw them probably in that island.

[Bell clanging]

♪♪

Rockwell: "The wind rises in from the sound

carrying the clang of the bell buoy from nearby City Island,

tolling its fitful warning.

All around is desolate and sad,

no kind hand to decorate these graves

with trophies of love and remembrance.

Not even a headstone to show where is interred

what was once a human being."

♪♪

"No one that sleeps there had a dollar to their name in life,

few a good word said for them after death.

The bodies interred here are as utterly forgotten

and wiped away as if they never existed.

And yet all those festering, rotting corpses

which lie below here once had hopes, ambitions,

likes and dislikes,

tastes, sympathies like ourselves.

But all that is not even now a remembrance."

[Bell clangs]

♪♪

Hunt: You can't help but thinking

when you look into an empty mass grave

about who's going to be buried there

and also about your own mortality.

♪♪

Human beings know that their lives are limited

and that the reconciliation of that

is the shaping of a community,

feeling that you're a member of that community

and that your life is extended through that community

beyond your own lifetime.

♪♪

And that's, of course, the first thing

that I saw going to Hart Island,

was that the inmates, when they were burying the dead,

they're saying the prayers to themselves.

There's a hopefulness to that, that the -- that the people

whose rights are largely taken away,

they still know how to commemorate the dead.

♪♪

So we know how to do this stuff

because it's -- it's basic to who we are.

And the reason we perform those rituals

is because we all fear that ourlives might not matter,

that people will forget us.

♪♪

The indifference that exists

comes out of enough people feeling

that, "Oh, this couldn't happen to me."

And what I've tried to show

is, in fact, it happens to everyone.

♪♪

All human remains in New York City,

if they are not claimed by family,

must be buried on Hart Island. That's the only option.

All human remains go to Hart Island.

Still, not everyone is accounted for.

So then what happens? We don't know.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

De Jesus: New York City is just for vacation.

New York City is just to come and have fun.

New York City is not a place to actually be living in.

♪♪

It's nothing.

♪♪

Flanzig: Hey, Katrina. So, I wanted to bring you in today

and talk a little bit about where we are with the case,

and the position and arguments the City's making

and the fight that I'm having with the city, which continues.

And I told them what you and I have talked about before.

Like, if you tell us where the baby is,

we'll drop the lawsuit today. That's what this is all about.

That's why we're trying to find out.

They don't believe us. I think it's about money.

It's not. It's about a search for the truth.

One of the issues for the city here, Katrina, is

if we establish here that they don't know,

there are other cases like yours that are out there pending,

and they don't want to make bad law.

They don't want to make bad precedent.

So the further they could push us back and slow us down,

the latter that those bad things will happen to the city.

So part of their delay is to not let this case come to trial,

because there are other cases

that are going to follow shortly behind.

Yeah, but I feel that they really ain't doing much

because all they thinking is about the money.

Yeah.And honestly, like I said,

I'm not doing this for money.

I want my son back. That's it.

♪♪

Flanzig: What we know right now from the records that we have

is that autopsy was performed.

The body at some point was at the morgue.

We do have some indication on one of the records

that the body was released for transport.

At this point, we don't know if it was transport

to some type of medical facility for research.

We don't know where that baby was released to.

We know where the baby was supposed to be released to,

and that's to Hart Island.

♪♪

Any case that I'm involved in with the city of New York

is always going to take me years.

Getting records out of the city of New York

requires motion after motion after motion

for a judge to compel them to respond.

They're more concerned with security issues

and welfare issues and housing issues

and all the things that make this city

a unique and crazy place.

So most likely, I won't -- No matter how much we fight,

we ain't gonna never have an answer.I can never guarantee you

that I'm gonna give you an answer to that question.

And I know that's the most important thing to you,

and that's been the focus of my case,

has always been about getting you those answers.

[Sighs]

Okay. [Sniffles]

Well, I guess we gonna keep fighting, then.

I need answers.

♪♪

De Jesus: I've been in New York since I was 15.

And I was never a fan to New York.

I came out here because I was mandated to come over here

with my stepmother.

But she ended up leaving me, so I've been by myself

since I was 15 out here.

It's been a rough life.

Me being out here has been real rough,

'cause everybody that has come into my life has left right out.

Nobody stays in my life.

The only people that stays in my life is my kids.

♪♪

You know, it bothers me a little bit,

because the story went out in the newspaper,

and the comments that they've been putting?

Horrifying. They really, like, put me down,

that I'm doing all of this for money.

And I'm like...

"What money? I didn't even ask for money."

♪♪

♪♪

Everybody just think about their tax money.

How did I decided to keep having kids,

knowing that I'm not financially stable?

♪♪

That doesn't mean anything.

I'm poor, and that's how I always been,

and that's how I'm gonna keep living.

I'm not planning on being rich.

♪♪

[People cheering in distance]

[Drums playing in distance]

Sweat: Why did my forefathers come to Hart Island

to join the Union army?

They came for one cry --

to be free, equal men, period.

♪♪

And I feel very emotional about it, because...

not only are the soldiers interred here,

but so is my daughter.

I named her Aisha.

♪♪

We ponder ourselves with many questions

about our daughter.

So we hope to bring closure to our family

and to bring honor, love, and respect to a soul

that we haven't had the opportunity to honor properly

for almost 50 years to this day.

♪♪

To not to have touched the earth that she's buried in,

it behooves me to go over there

to lay the first wreath at her grave site

and pay my respects to my daughter

who is buried on Hart Island

in potter's field of the city of New York.

♪♪

Then I can continue my plight

to bring the honor, respect,

and some type of fitting memorial statue

over on Hart Island

for these soldiers of the Civil War.

♪♪

♪♪

[Indistinct conversations]

[Both laugh]

[Laughs, speaks Spanish]

Yeah. Sí.After a long time.

[Speaking Spanish]

Very happy to be here.

[Speaking Spanish]

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you for sharing your story.

[Translating into Spanish]I think it was very important.

[Laughs]So here you are.

[Indistinct conversations]

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Bernstein: The most satisfying part of this reporting

has been that, armed with knowledge,

people can change the ending.

Hi. Hello. How are you?Ferrer: Hello. Buenos dias.

How are you? Come on in.

Gracias.

How are you?

This wasn't an investigation where you got a smoking gun

and you could go for the jugular.

This is the one bad guy.

It's just not like that.

Yes, there's some guardians who really didn't do their job.

And the medical examiner's office systemically

is not doing a proper job in many of these cases.

♪♪

Many factors have led to this place,

and it's really embedded in the -- in a lot of history.

But to have a city this modern, this cosmopolitan

that still buries the unclaimed dead

the way Jacob Riis recorded

in the 19th century

just doesn't make sense.

♪♪

It's archaic, it's bizarre,

and yet it also represents a truth about America,

about the Western world, perhaps,

that this tremendous inequality not only still exists,

but has -- has widened.

♪♪

Hanson: I mean, I wish life would have turned around.

I wish the rehabs would have worked.

I wish he would have kept the family,

because we all still loved him.

He couldn't help what he -- what he turned out to be.

She always felt that sorrow in her heart,

like, "Did I do that?" No, you didn't do that, Kim.

It was him doing that. It had nothing to do with you at all,

because he did love you.

He did love her. He did.

Bradshaw: My worry about having a child

is that I will -- I will give my child my issues.

I don't want to --

I don't want to screw up my child like I was.

[Children chattering in distance]

♪♪

There will always be emptiness.

I'll never feel complete.

♪♪

I could have just told him...

how I felt and how he destroyed a lot of my life,

because he did.

And, of course, I wanted something from him.

I wanted something-- a reason why or that he's sorry

or something, like, a little inch of him caring,

which I'll never get.

So...it sucks.

♪♪

♪♪

Sante: New York still has the draw.

It's still a name to conjure with.

It still sounds a musical note

to people in some distant part of the world.

♪♪

New York is distinct.

New York has always gone its own way.

[Indistinct conversations]

New York has its own bitter humor...

♪♪

...its own kind of culture, its own kind of literacy.

New York is not sentimental, because the city does not care.

The city does not care about you.

♪♪

That is one of the attractions of New York City, of course,

is that it's this monster you have to fight.

♪♪

You have to actually wrestle with the city

in order to just get the very basic necessities of life.

♪♪

And so the idea of the city

having something on its conscience,

this is a rather small blot, frankly.

I mean, with all honor to the dead, they aredead.

♪♪

♪♪

Levine: I think that the city has always wanted to forget

about Hart Island.

The city has wanted to forget

about the people who are buried there.

It's wanted to forget about the fact

that there is a potter's field,

that there is a place where difficult stories are hidden.

♪♪

New York City is celebrated

as the place where anyone can achieve their dreams,

but those dreams haven't been achieved by everyone.

♪♪

It's true of people toiling away,

digging out the tunnels for subways

or building our skyscrapers.

♪♪

It's true of people who have wound up homeless

or because a society shunned them,

as happened during the AIDS epidemic.

♪♪

Those stories might not be flattering to tell.

Even more, it might tell us things about our present

that we'd rather not face.

♪♪

But we owe it to the people who have been buried there

and are being buried there to bring their stories to light.

♪♪

Crowley: So, my bill to move the jurisdiction of Hart Island --

I believe that we're at a place where we could finally --

The momentum is growing

to make Hart Island a public place that is not forgotten.

♪♪

One million New Yorkers who built this city,

who made this city the city that it is today,

they should not be forgotten.

They need a better space to be resting in.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Hey.Hey! [Laughs]

[Laughing]

[Speaking Spanish]

[All speaking Spanish]

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

[All speaking Spanish]

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