In New York: Last Stop for the Poor

By Gregory Jaynes

One thick-aired Thursday morning in Manhattan, Charlie Garcia picked up ten dead paupers from the morgue at Bellevue Hospital. All the dead were adults, so they were in adult pine coffins, which cost the city $32.90 each. The price includes a tar-paper lining and a handful of zinc nails with which to seal the top. The cheap wooden boxes were placed in the back of Charlie's vehicle, which is still called the body wagon, although these days the wagon is an 18-ft. Ford truck, blue and gray, license number 20898-E, with 106,892 miles on the odometer. Nearly all the miles were spent going to and from Potter's Field, the burial ground for New York City's poor, and nearly all the miles were driven by Charlie Garcia. "See that blue van," said Charlie, lighting up a cigarette and tearing north on First Avenue. "That's what they use to get the bodies with. I used to have that job. You go in the houses, on the beach, wherever. It's an awful job. You have to straighten them out if rigor mortis has set in, and you put them in a bag. In this job, they're already in boxes."

A pretty blond woman in a sports car leaned out her window to ask Charlie how to get on the F.D.R. Drive, and he cheerfully gave directions, wondering whether she would have hailed him if she had known his cargo. Once, the truck broke down, and the tow truck driver the city sent got terribly upset when he learned what he was hauling. "People have a hard time when it comes to bodies," Charlie observed.

"I say it's the live ones you got to worry about, not the dead ones. They don't complain about the bumpy ride.

They don't complain if I get there late." Charlie drove the bodies up the East River, which fairly boiled this summer day, then through The Bronx, past signs for truck parts and cigarettes. The landscape was unrelievedly dismal until Charlie crossed the bridge to City Island, off the flank of The Bronx in Long Island Sound. Here there were bright, scrubbed storefronts, fishermen in slickers, the air of New England, and a ferry with a happy crew. Lloyd Roberts, an engineer, remarked on Charlie's load, "These passengers are the best. They don't pay, they don't talk back, and they are all one way." Last year 2,698 such passengers took the ferry from City Island across the 2/3-mile-wide channel to Hart Island, site of Potter's Field. In the past 114 years, about 1 million bodies have made the trip.

"And he [Judas] cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself. And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, 'It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood.' And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in."

--Matthew 27:5-7

New York City has had a potter's field in one place or another since 1755. There was one where Washington Square is today; there was one where the New York Public Library now stands. Since 1869 the cemetery for the indigent has been on Hart Island, 101 acres of goldenrod, Queen Anne's lace, sumac, broom sedge, oak and willow. At one time the island was also home to a prison. In another time there was a drug rehabilitation center here. Neither is in operation any more, and the red brick buildings now resemble what one imagines would be left after the bomb. Creepers embellish low walls fashioned from mortar and smooth river rocks by some forgotten mason--an ax murderer?

The city's department of corrections has charge of the island, though, and inmates bury the dead. In most instances, it is a case of the poor burying the poor, and over the course of decades there have been many former gravediggers who were laid to rest in the very soil they had once turned. And, as is always the way here, they did not go down into the earth alone, for burial in this field is like life in New York City: crowded. One goes to the grave in a gang, ten across, three deep, 148 bodies to the plot.

The cemetery occupies but 45 acres, and yet there is no risk of exceeding capacity. "I am told at some point you can use the same space twice," says Assistant Corrections Commissioner Edward Hershey. "You know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all that." A department pamphlet says that point is reached after a plot has been let alone 25 years, which is "sufficient time for the complete decay of the original remains."

Letting the plots alone, however, was a local issue of some measure a year or so ago. As blithely as they would spray profanities on the side of a subway train, vandals were desecrating the graves. "In New York City," wrote New York Lawyer William J. Dean, "we need police officers to protect even the dead." What the city did, one year ago, was to put inmates on Hart Island to care for and look out for the place. Before then, the inmates had been ferried to the island for the burying, then ferried back to prison at night. Now there is a work camp at Potter's Field, and 48 prisoners live there round-the-clock. The prisoners profess a fondness for the field.

Richard McMurray, who pulled time in the field last year, and who is back this year for grand larceny and possession of stolen property ("He catches the summers here," chides a buddy. "Some people go to the Hamptons") says it is a world apart from Riker's Island. "Over there it's a diseased cesspool," says McMurray. "Am I right or wrong," he yells to a dozen fellow diggers. "Right!" they holler, then go back to shoveling dirt into the gash that holds the ten coffins that Charlie Garcia has placed in their charge. "It's one germ after another [at Riker's Island]. If you don't have anything wrong with you going in, you will coming out."

"Here," McMurray begins to boast, just as his listener begins to feel this will not be McMurray's last stay, "you got the air. You got exercise, weights. You got baseball." Down the way is a diamond lined with rotting bleachers brought from Ebbets Field after the Dodgers moved their bases west. Down another way, at water's edge, a gull fell like a thunderbolt and dive-bombed a crab. Canadian geese strolled about with proprietary postures, as if they paid property tax. Out on the sound, two swans snagged lunch for three cygnets. Then a backhoe coughed into business and covered Emily Nickert, 78, who lay atop Helen Aleon, 89, whose coffin rested upon someone else who had died without a dime.

Charlie Garcia drove his empty body wagon away. Tomorrow, Friday, he would bring up another load from the medical examiner's office in Manhattan. He does not haul bodies on weekends or on Mondays. Tuesday is the day for the poor dead of Queens and The Bronx. Wednesday is for Brooklyn. And Thursday, Garcia comes back to Bellevue. Staten Island buries its own.

Garcia, like everyone else one meets in the business of disposing of this city's impoverished dead, seems rarely to have given the task a reflective thought; he might just as well be hauling pulpwood. Moreover, the mood in the morgue at Bellevue could easily be the mood on the loading dock of any plant:

"Hey, Tony, I hear your wife beat you up again last night."

"Where did you hear that?"

"Your wife."

Terrence Gallagher, who has worked in the morgue for 32 years, and is now the director, says he has never been to Potter's Field, nor has he any desire to go. "It's not my end of the job," he says, then turns to his staffing problems. "It's not that I want geniuses, but could they at least send me somebody who can read and write?"

And so the day ends. The gravediggers on Hart Island repair to a black-and-white television set to watch a rerun of Bonanza. Outside, in a corner of the field, last light leaves a stone on which somebody etched, "Cry not for us for we are with the Father. No longer do we cast shadows on the ground as you do. We are at peace.''

-- By Gregory Jaynes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.