New York City's Crumbling 'Island of The Dead' Is Unearthing Its Nameless Skeletons
1 million souls who can't stay buried.It's the largest mass burial site in the US, but for an estimated 1 million souls interred at New York City's 'Island of the Dead', their eternal resting place is disintegrating.
Hart Island in the Bronx, said to be the largest taxpayer-funded cemetery in the world, is crumbling in the face of longstanding erosion, and as the ground gives way, the buried remains of New York's unidentified poor are becoming exposed.
"Skeletal remains are literally just coming out of the earth," the director of non-profit Hart Island Project, Melinda Hunt, told CBS.
"Entire skeletons are sort of falling out of the hill onto the beach, and then they're washed away with the tide."
Hunt's organisation says the affected area – informally known as 'Bones Beach' – has been eroding for decades due to storms and severe weather, and after years of mismanagement by NYC's Department of Correction, which controls the site, the inevitable unearthing of human remains has reached a crisis point.
More: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-york-city-s-crumbling-island-of-the-dead-is-unearthing-its-nameless-skeletons-hart-bronx?perpetual=yes&limitstart=1
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I didn't know about it, but further reading revealed that this cemetery is apparently a kind of "potter's field" where the poor and unidentified were buried in mass graves for years. 
Over a million people are buried in the city’s potter’s field on Hart Island. A New York Times investigation uncovers some of their stories and the failings of the system that put them there.
Twice a week or so, loaded with bodies boxed in pine, a New York City morgue truck passes through a tall chain-link gate and onto a ferry that has no paying passengers. Its destination is Hart Island, an uninhabited strip of land off the coast of the Bronx in Long Island Sound, where overgrown 19th-century ruins give way to mass graves gouged out by bulldozers and the only pallbearers are jail inmates paid 50 cents an hour.
There, divergent life stories come to the same anonymous end.
No tombstones name the dead in the 101-acre potter’s field that holds Leola Dickerson, who worked as one family’s housekeeper for 50 years, beloved by three generations for her fried chicken and her kindness. She buried her husband as he had wished, in a family plot back in Alabama. But when she died at 88 in a New York hospital in 2008, she was the ward of a court-appointed guardian who let her house go into foreclosure and her body go unclaimed at the morgue.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-york-mass-graves-hart-island.html
And it's not like anyone thought about it or cared.
The biographies of some of these people are heart wrenching.
I ran across this article when I was reading something else. It's certainly disturbing, but it not much of a surprise. These are the people no one cared about or they wouldn't have been put out of sight and mind there. 
And that conditions there had been allowed to get so bad - even now!
And that was wonderful that you were able to do that for your friend. I can't imagine abandoning anyone, but then there have to be plenty of people without families. And having lost both my parents not that long ago, I know that the costs can be quite a lot. It does seem ridiculous though that you had to get permission when his relatives abdicated responsibility. He sounds like a very special guy. 
