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      Rethinking New York’s “dark shadow”: managing the unclaimed dead on Hart Island, 1869 to the present day

      research-article
      1 , *
       
      Architecture_MPS
      UCL Press
      Hart Island, New York, Covid-19, cemetery, prison, heritage, memory, potter’s field, Green-Wood Cemetery, The Hart Island Project

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          Abstract

          Approximately 11 miles from the bright lights of Manhattan, a barren, windswept island sits in the Long Island Sound. The landscape is punctuated by crumbling buildings, trees snaking through broken windows after decades of neglect. There are no people here, save for the incarcerated men brought over from Rikers Island to dig endless wide trenches, muddy and dark. Under the ground, the remains of over one million of New York’s most unloved citizens lie stacked in mass, unmarked graves. Or so the dominant narrative goes. This 131-acre island is better known as Hart Island, New York’s public cemetery where the unclaimed dead have been buried since the mid-nineteenth century. The site has long been positioned as the city’s ‘dark shadow’, the final resting place of the unwanted, the lonely, the forgotten and the marginalised. Elements of this narrative are undeniably grounded in truth – the stories of those who have ended up here, many of which have been carefully collected by renowned non-profit The Hart Island Project, offer up endless shades of heartbreak, loss and pain. However, the enduring public perception that a city burial here inevitably means a deeply shameful and degrading end to an unfulfilled, unhappy life is not only inaccurate, but it also severely limits the ways in which we can imagine a possible future for this site. This article aims to bring a historical perspective to the complex issues surrounding the public perception of, and possible future uses for, Hart Island, in order to offer an alternative view on how we can better understand sites of death and contemporary approaches to mourning going forward.

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          Most cited references71

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          The denial of death

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            Secure the Shadow: Death and photography in America

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              A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-century America

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Guest Editor
                Journal
                Archit_MPS
                Architecture_MPS
                UCL Press
                2050-9006
                21 September 2022
                : 23
                : 1
                : 1
                Affiliations
                City University of New York, USA
                [1 ]King’s College London, London, UK
                Author notes
                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4115-1588
                Article
                Archit_MPS-23-1
                10.14324/111.444.amps.2022v23i1.001
                5c9f77db-6640-4fdd-b371-e0bc8795b678
                2022, Catriona Byers.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited • DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2022v23i1.001.

                History
                : 27 June 2022
                : 19 July 2022
                Page count
                Pages: 20
                Categories
                Research article
                Custom metadata
                Byers, C. ‘Rethinking New York’s ‘dark shadow’: managing the unclaimed dead on Hart Island, 1869 to the present day’. Architecture_MPS 23, 1 (2022): 1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2022v23i1.001.

                Sociology,Political science,Political & Social philosophy,Urban studies,Architecture,Communication & Media studies
                memory,Hart Island,New York,Covid-19,cemetery,prison,heritage,potter’s field,Green-Wood Cemetery,The Hart Island Project

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