0:01

I'm Alex Schwartz. I'm Nomi Frye. I'm

0:03

Vincent Cunningham, and this is Critics at

0:05

Large, a New Yorker podcast for the culturally

0:08

curious. Each week, we're going to talk about

0:10

a big idea that's showing up across the cultural

0:12

landscape and we'll trace it through all the mediums

0:14

we love. Books, movies, television,

0:16

music, art. And I always want to talk about

0:19

celebrity gossip too. Of course. What

0:22

are you guys excited to cover in the next

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few months? There's a new translation of

0:25

The Iliad that's coming out, Emily Wilson. I'm really excited

0:28

to see whether I can read The Iliad

0:30

again, whether I'm that literate. I mean,

0:32

the jury is out.

0:33

I can't wait to hear Adam Driver

0:35

go again at an Italian accent in Michael Mann's

0:37

Ferrari. He can't stop. I mean,

0:40

and bless him. I can't wait. Molto

0:42

bene. Molto bene.

0:44

We

0:46

hope you'll join us for new episodes each Thursday. Follow

0:49

Critics at Large today wherever you

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You really don't want to miss this. Don't.

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Don't miss this. See

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you soon.

1:01

Radiotopia. From

1:04

PRX. On

1:15

a recent rainy Saturday morning, I visited

1:17

Hart Island for the first time. It's

1:20

New York City's potter's field. There are

1:22

more than a million people buried there on

1:24

a narrow strip of land. And it's

1:26

not easy to visit. You have to get permission

1:28

from the city. If they grant it, you

1:30

show up at an industrial dock in the Bronx

1:32

and ride a small ferry to the island. Everybody

1:36

has a designated area where they're visiting their loved

1:38

one. We will take you to that area. Then

1:41

you get on a bus. A guard escorts

1:43

you to the specific grave that you're signed

1:45

up to visit. In my case, Plot 414.

1:49

You're not allowed to just wander around. Everywhere

1:53

you look, you can see simple white posts with numbers on them. No names. Just

1:55

414-383-4143. Each

2:03

post represents a mass grave containing

2:05

about 150 coffins. The

2:09

guards give you a little time to pay your respects,

2:12

then the bus picks you up and takes you

2:14

back to the ferry.

2:24

This is the Unmarked Graveyard, a series

2:27

where we untangle mysteries from America's

2:29

largest public cemetery. I'm Joe Richman.

2:32

If you've been listening to our series, you've already heard a few

2:34

stories about people who ended up on Heart Island

2:37

and the people they left behind. We

2:39

have more stories coming up in the series, but today

2:41

we're doing something different, a bonus

2:43

episode about Heart Island itself. For

2:49

more than a century, Heart Island has been mostly

2:51

off limits. The fact that we

2:53

were able to make a series of stories about this place,

2:56

we owe a lot of that to a woman named Melinda

2:58

Hunt, who runs the Heart Island Project.

3:02

Here's Radio Diaries producer Elisa Scarsay

3:04

to tell you more about her story.

3:06

I haven't met a lot of people as single-mindedly

3:08

committed to anything as Melinda Hunt

3:10

is to Heart Island. She's been documenting

3:13

the place and then advocating for it for

3:15

more than 30 years.

3:17

I sat down with her recently to talk about it. Every

3:20

inch of the city needs its own little advocate.

3:22

Right. Heart Island is your coroner. Yeah.

3:26

Yeah. It's your base. Yeah. It's

3:28

my turf.

3:32

Melinda first heard about Heart Island from a doctor.

3:35

This was back in 1990 at the height of the AIDS

3:37

epidemic. And she

3:39

was describing how

3:43

babies would be

3:44

buried in shoeboxes in mass

3:46

graves in this island in the Bronx.

3:50

And at that time, I thought

3:53

that was extraordinary.

3:59

the he went

5:46

Could

6:00

we look at a couple of those photos from your

6:03

early trips? Sure. Yeah,

6:07

this is the first time we saw a burial. The

6:11

inmates are standing in a plot that is 60

6:13

feet long, 25 feet wide,

6:15

and 8 feet deep, and

6:22

they are by hand shoveling dirt, 4

6:23

feet of dirt on top

6:26

of

6:27

these boxes. I

6:30

quickly learned that the inmates were

6:32

the people most connected to these burials.

6:35

Not only did they perform them, but

6:37

many of them know somebody

6:41

from their neighborhood or their family

6:43

who was buried on Heart Island. So

6:46

they understood the experience

6:49

of losing someone in your community

6:52

and having them disappear onto Heart

6:54

Island.

6:56

Melinda spent about three years photographing

6:58

the island. The photos show a

7:01

place that was sort of wild looking and

7:03

overgrown. There were abandoned

7:05

buildings and a big sign that said,

7:07

prison, keep off, and

7:09

men unloading pine coffins off

7:11

of a morgue truck. Each coffin

7:14

had a person's name scrawled on the side. In 1998,

7:17

these photos were published in a book. So

7:21

what happened after you published this book?

7:24

So people started contacting me

7:26

because in the book, there's a photo of

7:28

a woman named Vicki Pavia who

7:31

I helped arrange for her to visit

7:33

on the 40th anniversary of her baby Denise's

7:36

birth and death. And

7:39

so people seeing this

7:41

book felt that maybe

7:42

there was hope that they could visit.

7:44

And people from all sorts

7:47

of backgrounds contact me

7:49

for

7:49

assistance.

7:51

And I felt that Heart Island had

7:53

this stereotype

7:55

of being a burial

7:57

ground of the unwanted. of

8:01

those people that we step

8:04

over and see on the subways. And

8:08

I felt that when I was speaking to these

8:10

families that that

8:13

isn't how they viewed their

8:14

relative.

8:15

And I felt that there was this stigma that

8:17

was so unnecessary and

8:20

really placed a

8:22

weight on these

8:24

families that carried

8:27

from one generation to the next, that

8:29

it was a stain on the family to

8:32

have somebody buried in

8:34

this place, this shameful place.

8:38

Some of these people were looking for proof that

8:40

their relatives were buried on Hard Island, but

8:43

records of the burials there were hard to get.

8:46

Melinda decided to help them. And in

8:48

this way, her work started expanding beyond

8:50

art into a kind of activism.

8:53

I was just trying to help

8:56

one person initially find

8:59

out where his father

9:01

was buried and on what day. And

9:04

this was a man who, both

9:07

his parents committed suicide and

9:09

he was adopted. And

9:11

New York State law allows for

9:13

him to find out who his

9:16

birth parents were once he turned 18.

9:19

So he started looking and he

9:21

got a death certificate,

9:25

but it didn't have anything listed under cemetery.

9:28

So he very much wanted a

9:31

confirmation

9:32

that his father was buried

9:34

on Hard Island.

9:36

Melinda submitted a freedom of information

9:38

request to get burial ledgers with information

9:40

about this man's parents. The ledgers

9:42

were handwritten pieces of paper with people's

9:45

names and the dates that they'd been buried. And

9:48

she got a lawyer.

9:49

And the attorney said, it's

9:52

not worth getting just one. How

9:54

many do you think they have going

9:57

back to 1985?

11:20

mom,

12:00

and we didn't know where she was buried because she didn't

12:02

want to be found. 27 years of

12:05

not knowing where she was buried. And now

12:07

I know. Love you and miss

12:09

you so much. RIP mom. Or

12:12

here's another note I love about a woman

12:14

named Hisako Hasagawa. We'll

12:17

actually have an episode about her in a couple weeks. It

12:20

says, Ms. Hasagawa lived in

12:22

the hotel I worked at. She had no family

12:24

that we know of. She was the sweetest old

12:26

lady to us all. I was so sad

12:28

to have learned of her passing while in her room, all

12:31

alone. One

12:33

of the notes that stood out to me especially was

12:35

about Neil Harris, the man you heard about in episode

12:37

one of this series. Here's his mom,

12:40

Susan, reading a missing person's flyer

12:42

that she made after Neil went missing a few years

12:44

ago.

12:45

Neil Harris was last seen in Inwood, New

12:48

York on December 12, 2014. He was last seen wearing

12:52

a tan Carhartt jacket, black hoodie,

12:54

blue jeans, tan work boots, and a backpack.

12:57

Susan ultimately found out that her son was

13:00

buried on Hard Island. And afterward,

13:02

she wrote in the database, never once

13:04

did I give up on him. I was sure

13:06

I was going to find my son. Just not

13:08

in this way. Well Linda and I looked

13:10

at the note together.

13:12

It says, Rest Easy, My Son,

13:16

August 29, 1984 to March 9, 2017 when he died. And there's

13:20

a

13:26

photo from 2010 of him sitting on a couch.

13:33

I went with Susan

13:35

to Hard Island. And she

13:38

told me that when she first heard that he was buried

13:41

on Hard Island, that she really was upset

13:43

and that the idea of him being

13:45

there was hard for her. But that

13:47

talking to you about Hard Island

13:50

changed her mind because you had described it as a

13:52

beautiful and very peaceful place near

13:54

the water and that it wasn't a thing to be ashamed

13:57

of. And that just

13:59

struck me as a testament to your

14:01

work and the way that your work has reframed

14:04

the way people perceive the place.

14:08

I think that some artists the

14:11

importance is is gallery shows

14:14

and museums.

14:15

For me it's

14:17

city policy and reframing

14:19

this terribly dark image

14:24

of a place that is so damaging

14:26

to so many people

14:27

so that

14:29

they believe that

14:31

their life matters to the city of New

14:33

York. That the lives of

14:35

their relatives matter.

14:39

A big part of how she's done this has been by

14:41

pushing the city to make it easier for family

14:43

and friends to see where their loved ones are buried

14:46

and to pay their respects. Basically

14:48

to make Hard Island feel more normal. Without

14:51

so much stigma, Melinda thinks more people might

14:54

choose to be buried on Hard Island. That's

14:56

what composer Noah Krashevsky did. We

14:58

told his story in episode 2. Here's

15:00

his husband David Sacks.

15:03

The idea of being buried collectively

15:05

in a what they used to call a pauper's grave

15:08

seemed very meaningful to him

15:10

and the more we talked about it the

15:13

more it seemed appealing you know the

15:15

simplicity, the anonymity,

15:18

the

15:19

humility

15:21

and it was on the water which he loved. For

15:24

someone who was such an egalitarian who

15:26

believed genuinely in everyone's

15:29

equality

15:30

it was the right decision

15:32

for him.

15:34

Melinda is pretty enthusiastic about people choosing

15:36

Hard Island partly to reduce the stigma

15:39

around it but also because she

15:41

says burials there are better for the environment.

15:44

The body is unembalmed in

15:46

a plain pine box and

15:49

will naturally turn to compost

15:53

in about 20 years

15:55

and most funeral

15:58

directors

15:59

offer cremation, which

16:02

is not green because you're turning a body

16:04

into carbon. Most

16:06

burials in cemeteries are now in

16:10

concrete vaults.

16:12

And they do that in cemeteries because

16:14

you

16:15

can have bodies much closer

16:17

together without the ground collapsing.

16:21

And it's easier to mow because as the

16:23

body's decomposed, it doesn't become

16:25

all lumpy and hilicky. So

16:27

it's what makes cemeteries

16:30

look like these very manicured levels

16:33

of ground and everything easy to maintain.

16:36

But those, in fact, are not green. Whereas

16:39

Heart Island, the bodies decompose

16:43

and

16:44

become parkland.

16:47

You've devoted now three

16:50

decades of your life to Heart

16:52

Island. What is it that has

16:54

kept you doing this work for all these years?

16:57

I just think it's a beautiful place. And

17:00

unlike other parts of the city, there's

17:02

something about it that brings about

17:04

a sense of humility, just

17:07

the scale of it and

17:09

the sense of being a small

17:11

person in a big space, a

17:13

little speck in the earth.

17:16

So you know that your little

17:19

existence is just a

17:21

very brief moment that,

17:24

oh, these things that we worry about every

17:27

day are

17:28

relatively small when it comes

17:30

to the rest of humanity and how

17:32

brief human history really

17:35

is.

17:38

Thanks so much, Melinda. Thank

17:40

you for having me.

17:45

That was Melinda Hunt of the Heart Island

17:47

Project with our producer, Elisa

17:49

Scarsay.

17:51

Partly in response to Melinda's efforts,

17:54

in 2021, New York City

17:56

transferred management of Heart Island from

17:58

the Department of Correction to the City's

17:59

the parks department

18:01

today incarcerated workers

18:03

from rikers island no longer dig degrades

18:06

most of the abandoned buildings on the island have

18:08

been removed and just recently

18:10

the parks department announced a plan to open

18:12

heart dial into the general public in the coming

18:14

months to learn more about melinda

18:16

hunts work visit hard island dot net and

18:19

to see drone footage of the island visit our website

18:22

radio diaries dot org

18:26

the raided or his team includes lisa

18:28

scar say nellie gillis make a he's

18:30

all the angles tina myself or

18:32

enders or ben shapiro and deborah george and

18:34

thanks to sarah cake kramer and junior gross

18:36

for their help with this project we're

18:38

proud members of radio toby a from p r x

18:41

a network of independent creed or own listener

18:43

supported podcasts you can hear them all

18:45

at radio tokyo dot fm and

18:47

radio diaries has support from the nash i'm down

18:49

for the humanities the load the often class

18:51

foundation york city's department of cultural

18:54

affairs and from listeners like you

18:58

coming up on the unmarked grave yard hart

19:00

island is often seen as a place for the unrecognized

19:03

or the unclaimed but some stories

19:05

don't said that script i do

19:07

think though will come a time when people

19:10

will realize that she's one of america's

19:12

greatest writers but after

19:14

she died john powell

19:17

was really kind of forgotten i'm

19:20

to richmond have read your diaries see

19:22

next week

19:24

radio