Talking Hart Island
A weekly podcast about America's largest mass grave, located on a small island in New York.
Episodes
In 1848 Ireland was gripped by famine. Nearly a million people would die of starvation and typhoid Fever. Desperate for survival a million more Irish would abandon their homeland and come to America. Many settled in the Five Points section of lower Manhattan infamous for its squalor, violence and disease
By the end of the Civil War, an estimated 30,000 orphan...
Professor and Musicologist.
Lloyd Buford Threlkeld, also known as “The Whistler” for his ability to make sweet melodious sounds emerge from his practiced nose flute, also played the guitar and sang. “Whistler and his Band” was one of the most famous jug bands of its time.
Threlkeld was born in Kentucky and in 1932 moved to Harlem in New York City. He continued ...
Director, New York Historical Society Resources & Programs.
It is estimated that during the AIDS epidemic thousands of AIDS victims were buried on Hart Island. Many because they had become disowned by their family and died unclaimed, and many more because there was no one left to take charge of their burials.
AIDS was particularly cruel and terrifying during the first f...
Professor Emertis, Hunter College.
During the period of Dutch and English settlement, New York City was one of the nation’s largest urban centers for the slave trade and served as a financial patron, of the plantation economy, in the South. In the Dutch colony, as many as 40 percent of the population were slaves.
Slaves had no choice of residence, were treated...
Professor, Harvard University.
On a hot midsummer night in June of 1969, a group of police officers stormed into Greenwich Village’s tiny Stonewall Inn, one of Manhattans early gay and lesbian bars. The patrons of Stonewall revolted. For many this confrontation would eventually become known as the Gay Liberation Movement.
As a result, New York City became the rallying place for gay m...
Leo Birinski was a playwright, screenwriter and director. He worked in Austria-Hungary, Germany and in the United States.
Birinski was the screenwriter of many Hollywood productions including, “Song of Song”s starring Marlene Dietrich, “The Lady Has Plans”, starring Paulette Goddard, and perhaps his most famous, “Mata Hari” starring the screen legend Greta Garbo.
U...
Professor Emeritus, Lehman College, City University of New York.
The Colored Orphan Asylum was founded, in New York City in 1836, as the nation’s first orphanage for African American children. The agency weathered three wars, two major financial panics, a devastating fire during the 1863 Draft Riots (in which over 120 people died and 2,000 injured), several epidemics, waves o...
Editor, writer, teacher, and tour guide.
When detectives and forensic scientists were called to investigate the Hart Island human remains, found littering its beach, none of them could have known they had been probably treading on additional mass graves, hidden beneath New York City’s parks, buildings, and sidewalks.
Hart island might be New York City’s largest mass grave, ...
Executive Director, Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.
By the early 1800’s New York City boasted a population of over 200,000, qualifying it as the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. As New York City’s population grew, so did its number of dead. The fact that the number of interred, in Trinity Church’s graveyard in 1822, was estimated at 120,000 was just...
Executive Director of Historic District Council.
In 2017 the annual “Six to Celebrate” initiative from the Historic Districts Council, highlighted six neighborhoods in New York City, in need of preservation attention: Hart Island, the city’s potter’s field which contains the mass grave of over one million people, was an unexpected addition to the list.
“The Hart Island facility is ...
While many of the young women and men who perished in the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory Fire could be identified, many could not. As unclaimed or identified deaths, according to New York City policy, bodies were traditionally shipped to the City Morgue at Bellevue and later passed on to potter’s field at Hart Island.
It was certain that the 22 identif...
The ship lurched in the heavy North Atlantic swell, its bow plunging deep in the troughs as it pitched sharply, its seasick passengers crammed into its small hold. The young lady, dressed simply, was just another anonymous face in the crowded ship. She kept to herself, as she’d always done. But the new world beckoned, and she tried to think about what awaited her. Her nam...
Professor (ret) USC.
Leo Birinski was a playwright, screenwriter and director. He worked in Austria-Hungary, Germany and in the United States.
Birinski was the screenwriter of many Hollywood productions including, “Song of Song”s staring Marlene Dietrich, “The Lady Has Plans”, staring Paulette Goddard, and perhaps his most famous, “Mata Hari” staring the screen legend Greta Garbo.
...Founded in 1849 to care for indigent immigrants in Greenwich Village, St. Vincent’s Hospital was sold in 2010 to create multi-million-dollar homes. In its 161 years of existence, the legendary institution treated survivors of the Titanic, tended to victims of both World Trade Center attacks, and served as Ground Zero of the AIDS Crisis.
With honesty, humor, and flights of h...
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, located at 97 and 103 Orchard Street, in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, is a National Historic Site. The Museum’s two historical tenement buildings were home to an estimated 15,000 people, from over 20 nations, between 1863 and 2011.
The museum’s exhibits and programs include restored apartments ...
Fifteen years after a Manhattan hospital sent her stillborn baby to New York City’s potter’s field for burial, MJ Adams heard the name Hart Island for the first time.
Adams, then living in New York City, learned the full-term baby boy she was carrying had died in utero. Devastated by grief and seeking a medical explanation, Adams agreed to an autopsy and was told it would take four to si...
Professor, University of Arizona.
For a man with a little known history, no legitimate records to prove his place of birth, or even his date of birth, and who would eventually be buried in a mass grave on Hart Island, Leo Birinski became a known playwright, , screenwriter, and film director.
Perhaps the best measure of a man is his work and for Birinski that included the German s...
Author and historian.
The influenza pandemic is believed to have killed somewhere between 50-100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. In New York City alone, more than 33,000 people died in a matter of w...
Physician and medical historian, University of Pennsylvania.
“The Bowery is one of the oldest stretches of land in Manhattan, and was once a footpath used by members of the Lenape tribe to transverse Manhattan Island. Once the home of the most affluent members of New York social circles, by the mid 1900’s its streets were occupied by low-brow concert halls, German beer gardens, d...
Professor at University of Prince Edward Island.
Ruth Proskauer Smith, or Ruth P. Smith as she became more commonly known as, was a historic pro-choice reproductive rights, and pro-right to die advocate. Even after she was over one hundred years old, she spent much of her time teaching other senior citizens about the Supreme Court, as she wanted to pass on her knowledge to...
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