Radio Diaries and Radiotopia are launching a new podcast called “The Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island.” Pictured, Susan Hurlburt visits her son’s grave on the island.
Photo Andrew Lichtenstein/Radio Diaries
Stephen used to sit on the same bench at Riverside Park in the Upper West Side nearly every day. But after his body turned up dead in 2017 and officials couldn’t identify him, he was buried on Hart Island.,,His story — like many buried on the small isle off the Bronx’s eastern coast — was lost, until a woman who knew him from the park came across his true identity. Now that story of Stephen, whose birth name was Neil Harris Jr., and others who were laid to rest on Hart Island — some otherwise forgotten — is coming to light thanks to a new Radio Diaries and Radiotopia podcast that aims to pay tribute to their lives.
The first episode of “The Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island,” titled “The Man On The Bench (Neil Harris Jr.),” comes out Thursday on the Radio Diaries podcast.
Joe Richman, a Peabody-winning reporter and producer and the founder of Radio Diaries, who also hosts the show, said “The Unmarked Graveyard” coincides with the types of stories told on other shows — which mostly are “hidden and buried and less known.”
“We think about a lot of our stories as sort of living obituaries … celebrating people and stories, preserving them before they’re gone,” Richman said in an interview with the Bronx Times.
The small isle of Hart Island, also known as the City Cemetery or Potter’s Field, is a mass graveyard where more than 1 million New Yorkers are buried. When the city began using the island as a public burial site in 1869, plots were occupied by people who “died indigent” — whose families either couldn’t afford other burial services or whose bodies went unclaimed after their death. Most recently, the island was used to bury people who died of epidemic…
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