Content
Skip to Main ContentAccessibility Help
As It Happens

UPDATED: Mourners now allowed to visit graves in New York paupers' cemetery

If you die poor in New York City, chances are you'll end up buried on Hart Island - one of the largest paupers' cemeteries in the United States. After pressure from families, the city has finally opened up the island to visitors.
CBC News ·
(The Hart Island Project / ©2010 Melinda Hunt, The Hart Island Project)
As It Happens6:17Mourners now allowed to visit graves in New York's paupers' cemetery

UPDATE: May 12, 2016: 

Our guest for this story, Rosalee Grable, died Tuesday of pancreatic cancer. During out interview, Grable expressed her wish to be buried on Hart Island. Now she will join her mother and be laid to rest at the paupers' cemetery. Because of the rule she helped change, Grable's friends and family will be able to visit her grave on the island. 

Rosalee Grable died Tuesday in New York. She will be buried in the cemetery she helped campaign to be open to visitors. (Rosalee Grable)

For more than a hundred years, New Yorkers who couldn't afford a cemetery plot ended up in unmarked graves on Hart Island, which sits off the coast of the Bronx. Now, for the first time, the city is allowing relatives to visit the paupers' cemetery.

Rosaless Grable's mother died in 2014 and was buried 'apartment style' -- a term she prefers to 'mass grave' -- on the island. On Sunday, along with other mourners, she visited the site.

"It's a beautiful place," she tells As It Happens guest host Laura Lynch. "Even a millionaire couldn't have a more gorgeous view."

Former Workhouse and Current Gravesites on Hart Island, New York. ( ©2004 Melinda Hunt/The Hart Island Project )

Grable's mother is buried in a plain, pine box stacked three deep in the earth. The island is desolate, littered with abandoned buildings and a single 20-foot monument to the dead, engraved with a cross. As many as a million people are buried there. 

Grable says her mother Gladys Van Aelst ended up being buried on Hart Island after she became sick unexpectedly. Money that she had saved for her burial ended up going to one of her daughters. 

"My sister needed a car and my mother sent her everything she had," says Grable.

Adult Burial trench with area of unknown AIDS graves in the background. ( ©2004 Melinda Hunt/The Hart Island Project)

The city has fought requests to visit the island, arguing that it lacked amenities and was unsafe. After a class action lawsuit, the city relented, agreeing to once-a-month visits for relatives and their guests. 

Grable says her visit to the island put her at peace. She says she wouldn't mind being buried on the island herself.

"We sang Amazing Grace and just kind of looked around and admired the surreal atmosphere. It was very, very beautiful."

The Hart Island Project is a website that's trying to connect living relatives with those buried on Hart Island. You can check it out here. 

More from this episode