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New York City has had a potter's field in one place or another since 1755. There was one where Washington Square is today; there was one where the New York Public Library now stands. Since 1869 the cemetery for the indigent has been on Hart Island, 101 acres of goldenrod, Queen Anne's lace, sumac, broom sedge, oak and willow. At one time the island was also home to a prison. In another time there was a drug rehabilitation center here. Neither is in operation any more, and the red brick buildings now resemble what one imagines would be left after the bomb. Creepers embellish low walls fashioned from mortar and smooth river rocks by some forgotten mason—an ax murderer?
The city's department of corrections has charge of the island, though, and inmates bury the dead. In most instances, it is a case of the poor burying the poor, and over the course of decades there have been many former gravediggers who were laid to rest in the very soil they had once turned. And, as is always the way here, they did not go down into the earth alone, for burial in this field is like life in New York City: crowded. One goes to the grave in a gang, ten across, three deep, 148 bodies to the plot.
The cemetery occupies but 45 acres, and yet there is no risk of exceeding capacity. "I am told at some point you can use the same space twice," says Assistant Corrections Commissioner Edward Hershey. "You know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all that." A department pamphlet says that point is reached after a plot has been let alone 25 years, which is "sufficient time for the complete decay of the original remains."
Letting the plots alone, however, was a local issue of some measure a year or so ago. As blithely as they would spray profanities on the side of a subway train, vandals were desecrating the graves. "In New York City," wrote New York Lawyer William J. Dean, "we need police officers to protect even the dead." What the city did, one year ago, was to put inmates on Hart Island to care for and look out for the place. Before then, the inmates had been ferried to the island for the burying, then ferried back to prison at night. Now there is a work camp at Potter's Field, and 48 prisoners live there round-the-clock. The prisoners profess a fondness for the field.
Richard McMurray, who pulled time in the field last year, and who is back this year for grand larceny and possession of stolen property ("He catches the summers here," chides a buddy. "Some people go to the Hamptons") says it is a world apart from Riker's Island. "Over there it's a diseased cesspool," says McMurray. "Am I right or wrong," he yells to a dozen fellow diggers. "Right!" they holler, then go back to shoveling dirt into the gash that holds the ten coffins that Charlie Garcia has placed in their charge. "It's one germ after another [at Riker's Island]. If you don't have anything wrong with you going in, you will coming out."