Hart Island is New York City’s public cemetery, its potter’s field, where the unclaimed, unidentified, and indigent are buried. As many as a million people have been laid to rest here since 1869, both adults and children, and among them are the victims of almost every plague that has struck the city—from tuberculosis and typhus to AIDS and Covid—along with the more enduring afflictions of poverty and aloneness. Some people have chosen to be buried there—because it is free, because it is communal—but the majority have not. Instead, they more or less drifted there, pulled by the currents of addiction, mental illness, stigma, or neglect. From the margins they came, and to the margin they were sent.
To visit this place, as a living person, is a somewhat more complicated proposition. Much like another well-known netherworld, Hart Island can be reached only by ferry and is off-limits to most of the public. Even so, stories have made their way from its shores over the decades—legends and myths, shards and fragments, fables, yarns, and a few gemlike oddities. These include the usual paranormal fare—accounts of silhouettes in the fog and the like—but the majority, and by far the most interesting, are the tales bound in fact: the ones of real people, stacked three high in mass trenches, whose lives read like an alternate history of New York City.
Among the most curious of these is the story of a child. This child lies in a grave that is different from most of the others: It is half-hidden at the southern tip of the island and is separated not only by distance but by the fact that it contains just a single body. On the grave’s marker, there is a runic sort of inscription that reads “SC-B1 1985.” If you Google about for an explanation, you will find—via both official New York City websites and various news sources—that it stands for “Special Child–Baby 1” and the year of their burial, 1985. You will also find this: The grave belongs to the first child to have died of AIDS in New York City.
This, however, is all that you will find. The child’s name and age, the date of their death, the reason for their interment on Hart Island—none of that is known. Nor will you find any of the hazier details that make up a life, like the color of the child’s eyes or the sound of their laugh or the timbre of their cries. There is only the one assertion—this was the first child to have died of AIDS in New York City—and the nothingness that surrounds it. A mystery.