our history
of hart island
& phoenix house

8000 BCE – The peoples of Lenape Tribal Nation were living on the Northeast Coast. For thousands of years their people fished and hunted on Hart Island.
1654 – Thomas Pell buys a large tract of land from the Siwanoy Indians, including what is now known as Hart Island.
1774 – Pell’s heirs sell the land to Oliver DeLancey.
1776 – The name Hart Island first appears on maps.
1863 – The earliest known recorded mustering on the island of Union recruit units in the Civil War.
1864 –
April, 1864 – The 31st United States Colored Troops Regiment, one of three in New York, is organized on the island.
The Hart Island regiment will see action at the fall of Petersburg on April 2, 1865. It will pursue Lee’s army from April 3 through April 9 and be at Appomattox before, during and after the Confederate surrender on April 9, 1865. These soldiers will give their life for the Union.
November 1864 – Construction of a prisoner-of-war(POW) camp on Hart Island begins.
Twenty Union Army soldiers who died before 1865 were buried in a small burial ground on the island.
1865 – The first Confederate POW’s arrive on Hart Island.
1868 – The City of New York purchases Hart Island for use by the Department Of Corrections to operate a city cemetery.
April 20, 1869 – Twenty-four year old Louisa Van Slyke was the first person to be buried in the island’s forty-five acre public graveyard. The cemetery then became known as “City Cemetery” and “Potters Field.” The classic definition of potters field is a burial place for unknown, unclaimed, or indigent people.
1870 – The Yellow Fever Epidemic hits New York. The sick are quarantined on Hart Island.
1875 – Mass burials begin on Hart Island.
1877 – The New York City Army Reserve constructs a monument to honor the Union Civil War soldiers and sailors interred on the island.
1885 – The Pavilion, a women’s psychiatric hospital, opens on Hart Island.
1895 – A prison workhouse is established for drug addicts and aged or infirm inmates. It will remain in use until World War II.
1905 – The asylum is turned into a Reformatory for Misdemeanants, more generally referred to as the reform school for “vicious boys.”
1916 – The remains of Union troops who died on the island are removed to the Soldiers Cemetery in the Bronx.
1925 – Solomon Riley, an African American millionaire, purchases a section of the island to build a “Negro Coney Island.” He built a dance hall, a two hundred foot boardwalk, a bathing pavilion and boarding houses before the City condemned the project. The City took the property back and Mr. Riley sued for compensation. The Court ordered the City to pay him $144,000.
1940’s – The island is used as a disciplinary barracks for the Navy, Coast Guard and Marines.
1941 – The remains of another group of Civil War dead are disinterred and removed to a cemetery in Queens.
1942 – WWII arrives on the shores of America when three Nazi sailors surface in a U-Boat near Long Island and are taken as POWs to Hart Island.
1946 – Hart Island is returned to the Dept Of Corrections and the jail is reactivated.
1948 – Inmates erect a thirty foot high “peace” monument, in the center of the burial site to the north, to honor the unknown dead.
1955 – United States Army Air Defense Command opens the only missile site in the metro New York area, NY-15, and places missile launchers in silos on the north end of the island.
1967 – Phoenix House, a drug and rehabilitation center, opens on the island with funds from the New York State Narcotics Addiction Control Commission and the New York City Narcotics Coordinator. The program was made possible due to a 1967 Penal Law that allowed judges to mandate narcotics addicts to three years of treatment in lieu of incarceration for crimes committed in New York State. Phoenix House remained on the island until 1976 when it closed its Hart Island location.
Late 1960’s until early 1970’s – Phoenix House holds festivals and public concerts on the island with artist Janis Ian and the band The Velvet Underground among others.
1982 – Housing opens for a small contingent of inmates from the Rikers Island jail to bury the unknown dead.
1985 – The first seventeen victims of AIDS were quarantined and buried on Hart Island. Subsequently, the number of AIDS burials on Hart Island would reach into the thousands, making it perhaps the single largest burial ground in the country for people with AIDS.
1991 – Inmate housing ends but cemetery operations continue with day work units of prisoners from Rikers Island jail.
1994 – Melinda Hunt founds the Hart Island Project, a 501-(c)-3 Charitable Organization, which has been in the forefront of improving access to the island to families whose loved ones have been buried on the island.
2018 – The Hart Island Project maps the entire island using a drone and embeds geotiffs into over 68,000 profiles listed in the Traveling Cloud Museum. This information now displays on their homepage https://www.hartisland.net/.
November 14, 2019 – the New York City Council passes legislation to create a public park where citizens can freely visit graves.
December 4, 2019 – NYC Parks and Recreation assumes jurisdiction, ending 150 years of penal control over city burials. NYC Parks takes over managing Hart Island by July 1, 2021.
This transfer comes directly as a result of advocacy by The Hart Island Project, their creation of a database of recent burials and their Traveling Cloud Museum storytelling platform. Burial information about each person includes a clock that measures the period of time that they have been buried in anonymity until someone adds a story, image, epitaph, sound or video.
April 3, 2020 – Inmate labor ended on Hart Island after a century and a half.
2020 – Potters Field is used to bury victims of Covid 19.
April 6, 2020 – contracted labor was hired to conduct the burials. Families of people who died of COVID-19 were asked to consent to a city burial. To give families additional time to decide or make alternative arrangements, the New York City medical examiner stored their bodies in freezer trucks for months. Burial records indicate that New York City buried people who died in April five or six months after being stored in freezer trucks.
The Hart Island Project COVID-19 Initiative is helping the larger community to locate the gravesites of people they knew and support families and friends of people buried in the City Cemetery. Through engaged storytelling the Initiative hopes to enlarge the meaning of this landscape and make it an inclusive rather than shameful resting place. https://www.hartisland.net/covid_initiative

Hart island is a mysterious place and even though I lived there, I don’t feel like I know it at all. I’ve started studying its history and found that it’s even more mysterious than I imagined.
For me, it was home for nearly two years when I lived at Phoenix House, a therapeutic community that opened one of its units on the island in 1966 and closed up shop soon after I left in 1976.
From 1974-1976. I was fourteen when I got there, sixteen when I left.
The staff was made up mainly of former addicts and graduates of the program. Most of the residents were adults, although there was a small minority of teenagers, including me. Some people were there on plea deals, beating Federal time, others were trying to beat heroin. Some people arrived still addicted to methadone, a very painful drug to kick.
We were an Island of lost souls.
Pretty much everyone in Phoenix House had suffered truly awful experiences, some in prison, some living in the streets, raised by addicts, abandoned as children, living in poverty – they were a tough group so it took an awful lot to wear down their defenses. The Marathon is built to do that, to break you down to your core. All kinds of methods were used.
It was a grim place. No one wanted to be there, but for some people it was a much better place than where they could have been – I certainly felt that way myself.
In June 1976 I finished the program at Phoenix House. -Ellen kaye