‘A Prison for the Dead’: Hart Island and Spatial Histories of Marginalization

Abstract

Four times a week, New York’s unidentified and unclaimed dead were transported by truck to City Island, at the western end of Long Island Sound and part of Bronx Community District 10. The bodies, packed into unmarked pine boxes, were then loaded onto a ferry to be delivered to Hart Island a third of a mile away. People imprisoned at the nearby Rikers Island prison complex unloaded the boxes. Situated off the shore of New York City, Hart Island is a mile long and has served as the site of numerous interventionist projects since the mid-nineteenth century. From quarantine stations to a psychiatric hospital, the island’s varied public use history has always primarily revolved around the containment and disposal of society’s most marginalized, both in life and in death. This chapter focuses on the spatial, political, and economic entwining of burial and imprisonment on Hart Island, in order to argue its specific landscape has lent itself particularly well to this weaponization—and that its troubled ownership pattern has rendered this weaponization all the more effective. It explores how landscapes can become implicated in challenging necropolitical processes and complicate and perpetuate cultural attitudes surrounding death, illness, and marginalization.