NEW York’s coronavirus victims could be buried on Hart Island which already holds one million bodies, insiders say.
A source from NYC Mayor de Blasio’s office told The Sun public parks will not be used for burials, but the City has used The Bronx graveyard in the past and could do so again amid the COVID-19 crisis.
The news comes after a Manhattan councilman tweeted that the City may be forced to use local beauty spots as the final resting place for coronavirus patients as the death toll topped 10,000 Monday.
Mark Levine posted on Twitter that “trenches will be dug for 10 caskets in a line” to cope with the COVID-19 crisis as morgues and hospitals struggle to cope with the body count.
But sources now indicate that barren Pelham Bay — Hart Island – the largest tax-funded cemetery in the United States – may be critical during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dubbed Potter’s Field – or the “Island of the Dead” – some 68,955 souls have been buried in mass graves on this 101-acre site off the coast of the Bronx since 1980.
Many of these were AIDs patients according to The Hart Island Project.
The New York State Funeral Directors Association urged its members not to embalm AIDS fatalities in 1983.
Undertakers scrambled to handle the bodies of people who died of the deadly disease as a result of this.
Bowery men were also laid to rest in wooden coffins on Hart’s Island after they were poisoned by drinking wood-alcohol.
Another person buried there was beloved housekeeper Leola Dickerson, who buried her husband in Alabama but lies alone in the NYC plot.
Her court-appointed guardian allowed her house go into foreclosure upon her death in 1988, leaving her body unclaimed at the morgue, reports the New York Times.
This potential burial ground for COVID patients was historically under the jurisdiction of the NYC Department of Corrections. Rikers Island inmates performed burials a few times a week for 50c an hour.
Before the deadly coronavirus ravaged the Big Apple, the City promised to overhaul the largely inaccessible graveyard and allow NYC Parks to have an input.
Family members of the dead have previously said it’s run like a prison with infrequent ferries and bookings to visit loved ones’ graves having to be made months in advance, New York Post reports.
Levine – the then NYC Council Committee on Parks and Recreation – had actually led a public hearing on the matter of Hart’s Island back in 2016.
Due to erosion issues, dozens of skeletons were left exposed to the elements two years later when officials had to collect 174 bones which had tumbled onto the nearby shoreline.
The desolate site has also hosted facilities like a drug rehabilitation center, a Cold War Nike missile base, a yellow fever quarantine zone, a prison, a women’s insane asylum, and a TB hospital, according to Untapped Cities.
Now, sources say it may prove to be a vital burial ground once more as the bodies count rises in NYC.
Earlier, Levine said a more “gruesome” solution was in the works as the strain on City’s morgues and funeral directors continued to mount with surging death tolls.
“Soon we’ll start ‘temporary interment,'” he said in a Twitter thread. “This likely will be done by using a NYC park for burials (yes you read that right). Trenches will be dug for 10 caskets in a line.”
But New York Governor Andrew Cuomo rejected his claims later that day at his COVID-19 briefing.
“I have heard a lot of wild rumors but I have not heard of the city burying people in parks,” Cuomo said.
However, Levine insisted he was telling the truth despite the push-back, saying “the plan to temporarily inter in a city park or other public property is a *contingency*, one that could be avoided if the # of deaths drops significantly, or if we find a way to secure add’l freezer space.”
“I think we do a disservice to the public by leaving this topic shrouded in mystery,” Levine wrote.
“The public should know how we are dealing with this crisis, and that we are prepared for the worst–while we continue to hope and pray the worst won’t come to pass.”
Over the weekend, De Blasio assured reporters the City could handle the increasing death toll but declined to go into detail about COVID burials.
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