Hart Island

Although the facility was created to handle a spring 2020 onslaught of COVID-19 deaths, it now holds the bodies of people who have died of various causes and are awaiting final arrangements.

The Delta variant of COVID-19 is in New York City – and Staten Island is seeing a higher caseload than any other part of the city. Chris Glorioso talks with health officials about the issue.

Nearly 14 months after New York City reported its first coronavirus-related death, roughly 750 people who died at the height of the pandemic whose bodies have not been claimed are still being held in temporary long-term storage by the medical examiner’s office at a pier in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. The temporary morgue was created during the worst of the…

This article was originally published on Mar 24 at 9:29pm EDT by THE CITY. Sign up here to get the latest stories from THE CITY delivered to you each morning. This story was produced in collaboration with THE CITY and Columbia Journalism School’s Stabile Center of Investigative Journalism, as part of “MISSING THEM,” THE CITY’s ongoing collaborative project to remember every New Yorker...

Funeral homes in the tri-state area are overwhelmed as the death toll continues to rise. John Chandler reports.

Families hoping to bury victims of the coronavirus are finding mounting burial costs – and funeral homes so overwhelmed they can’t help. Jonathan Dienst reports.

As New York City deals with a mounting coronavirus death toll, the city has shortened the amount of time it will hold unclaimed remains

Funeral home and cemetery directors in New York City suggest the COVID-19 crisis has burdened the “aftercare industry,” resulting in the delay of some burials while a number of hospitals have a buildup of bodies that go days without aftercare. Jonathan Dienst reports.

The New York City mayor has signed a bill that transfers control of the nation’s largest public burial ground from the correction department to the parks department. Mayor Bill de Blasio signed the legislation on Wednesday. More than 1 million people are buried on Hart’s Island just off the Bronx. The island has been controlled by the Department of Correction,...

New York City officials are considering a plan to turn an island where poor and homeless people have been buried for 150 years into a park.

Get a closer look at the top stories for Tuesday, May 29.

Storms and the tides are unearthing the long-hidden bones of Hart Island, creating eerie scenes of skulls, femurs and collarbones on this sliver of land where New York City’s destitute dead have for 150 years been sent off to be unceremoniously buried and forgotten.