The first proofs of my website will come to me on Tuesday. I just sent my design team the three reviews that New Yorkers has received to date, so they can incorporate them into the site. Meanwhile, New Yorkers is still available from Amazon, both print and e-book, a great read for a world in lockdown. For my other books, go here.
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GETTING RID OF
THE UNWANTED DEAD:
THE OFFAL BOAT,
THE FORBIDDEN ISLAND
The offal boat
In the old days of horsepower, before the internal combustion engine, the city’s transportation was mostly horse-drawn, which meant that the city’s streets were often encumbered with dead horses, not to mention cows, and the pigs that ran about freely, scavenging the streets and thus saving their owners the cost of feed. So what happened to all those smelly carcasses, so offensive to eye and nostril? The answer: the offal boat.
Departing a dock at 34th Street in the North (Hudson) River regularly in the 1860s was a small sloop piled high with the carcasses of horses, cows, pigs, dogs, and cats, plus barrels, tubs, tanks, and hogsheads of blood and entrails. Its destination: a bone-boiling plant up the river that would receive this smelly cargo and use it to produce leather, bone (for buttons, etc.), manure, soap, fat, and other products. In one week the sloop disposed of 50 horses, 9 cows, 135 small animals, and 3,100 barrels of offal. The city’s butchers delivered blood and offal from the slaughterhouses; the rest was brought in ten carts by a contractor. In this way the streets were delivered of an odorous impediment that was actually turned into a variety of useful products.
Which prompts me to ask what happens today to all those junked cars and other abandoned contraptions that we would like to make disappear. Where are they, and what becomes of them? While hiking on Staten Island I have seen abandoned cars half hidden by creeping vegetation, for Americans treat parklands as dumping grounds. But what about all the other vehicles? Will archeologists eons hence discover the remains of vast automobile graveyards and wonder what strange civilization could have produced such a huge array of junk? Or will all that have crumbled away, leaving only little plastic thingamabobs? I wonder.
The Forbidden Island
And what becomes of humans -- the unclaimed bodies that turn up in every big city? The answer in New York is that, since 1869, they are taken to Hart Island, a quiet, grassy island only about a mile long and a quarter mile wide in Long Island Sound near City Island in the Bronx. This now uninhabited island, at various times the site of a lunatic asylum, a sanatorium, a boys' workhouse, and a drug facility, is the city's potter's field, the final resting place of some 800,000 anonymous, indigent, and forgotten persons who are buried in closely packed pine coffins in common graves, three coffins deep for adults, and five for babies. Some 1500 bodies arrive yearly, about half of them stillbirths and infants who are interred in small pine coffins. "Baby Morales, age 5 minutes," says the paperwork on one; "Unknown male, white, found floating on the Hudson at 254th Street," says another. Burials are done quickly and routinely without funeral rites, unless some spontaneous prayer from a gravedigger.
And who are those gravediggers? Inmates from Riker's Island who arrive by boat handcuffed, but then climb down into the trenches to work unmanacled, most of them glad to be away from prison and out in the open air, working in the flat, calm solitude of the island. They are paid all of fifty cents an hour, as is typical of our prison/industrial complex. But they are not insensitive. "Respect, guys, respect!" they caution one another, as they lower the coffins into the graves and then cover them with dirt.
Hart Island is not open to the general public, most of whom have probably never even heard of it, and trespassers face a stiff fine. But family members able to prove their relatives are buried there can arrange visits. This is no easy task, since one has to navigate numerous city agencies to obtain the necessary information. The coffins have no individual markings, but each grave corresponds to an entry in a ledger. If successful, the family members can then arrange to have the remains disinterred and removed for burial elsewhere. But most of the remains are unclaimed.
Note: I have often wondered where the phrase "potter's field" comes from. It is Biblical, saying what the chief priests did with Judas's thirty pieces of silver when, repenting of his betrayal of Jesus, he flung them down on the floor of the temple and went and hanged himself: "And they took counsel, and bought the potter's field, to bury strangers in" (Matthew 27:7). A field used for extracting potter’s clay was useless for agriculture and so was available for burials.
And who are those gravediggers? Inmates from Riker's Island who arrive by boat handcuffed, but then climb down into the trenches to work unmanacled, most of them glad to be away from prison and out in the open air, working in the flat, calm solitude of the island. They are paid all of fifty cents an hour, as is typical of our prison/industrial complex. But they are not insensitive. "Respect, guys, respect!" they caution one another, as they lower the coffins into the graves and then cover them with dirt.
Hart Island is not open to the general public, most of whom have probably never even heard of it, and trespassers face a stiff fine. But family members able to prove their relatives are buried there can arrange visits. This is no easy task, since one has to navigate numerous city agencies to obtain the necessary information. The coffins have no individual markings, but each grave corresponds to an entry in a ledger. If successful, the family members can then arrange to have the remains disinterred and removed for burial elsewhere. But most of the remains are unclaimed.
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| Southern entrance to the Pavilion, once a women's prison, later a drug rehab facility. Photo courtesy of Ian Ference, The Kingston Lounge. |
What is it like on the island? The few who are allowed to visit have different impressions. One visitor, seeing the crumbling vestiges of earlier installations, called it a dilapidated ghost town; another found it surprisingly peaceful, surrounded on sunny days by an expanse of scintillating water, and serenaded by the distant clanging buoys of Long Island Sound. One hopes, for this last resting place of the unknown and forgotten, that the latter impression is more accurate. But those crumbling vestiges have a haunting beauty that photography reveals: the beauty of abandonment and desolation. I shall never be able to visit this forbidden island, but everything about it breathes mystery.
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| Second floor of the Pavilion. Photo courtesy of Ian Ference, The Kingston Lounge. |
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| Interior of the asylum's hospital. Photo courtesy of Ian Ference, The Kingston Lounge. |
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| Unused pine coffins in the hospital. Photo courtesy of Ian Ference, The Kingston Lounge. Source note: These photos of Hart Island are from Ian Ference’s website, The Kingston Lounge. I urge viewers to access that website to see haunting photos of other crumbling structures. Coming soon: Dumb. Who is and who isn't. FDR, Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, and me. And maybe you, too. © 2020 Clifford Browder |
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