Thirty years after his death, Elsie Soto finally gets to give her father a memorial service.
Soto has been campaigning for the city to place a bereavement stone on Hart Island for the better part of the past year — an initiative she says will finally give New Yorkers who are buried on the island, including her father, recognition. And after a memorial walk in Central Park planned for Sunday, the seven-foot tall, four-foot wide granite stone will be transported Tuesday out to the island at long last.
After running into bureaucratic roadblocks trying to get the stone out to Hart Island, the city approved the measure in March. According to a spokesperson from the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, the memorial stone will be temporarily placed at the gazebo close to the entrance of the island, with the intent to get approval from the city Public Design Commission for permanent placement. NYC Parks has managed Hart Island since 2019 when it took it over from the Department of Corrections.
“Something that I always felt was necessary was a meaningful, respectable, dignified memorial,” Soto said. “We didn’t make these mistakes, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t right the wrongs of the past.”
Hart Island, which sits off the coast of City Island in the Bronx, is New York City’s mass public cemetery that serves as a final resting place for more than 1 million other New Yorkers. The majority of those buried there either “died indigent” or of epidemic or pandemic diseases, or their bodies went unclaimed after their death.
According to City Council data, the number of burials in the late 1980s through the early 1990s “increased markedly” — coinciding with the AIDS epidemic. Even more recently, officials were scrambling to make room for New Yorkers who died of COVID-19. A vast majority of the 1 million people who are buried on Hart Island were placed in unmarked graves, so many people have trouble locating their loved ones’…
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