If you’ve ever lived in the outer boroughs of New York, especially in the not so nice areas, you may have been reminded of Dickensian London.  I’ve always been amazed by the resourcefulness of the people, the use of the land and the conditions that people (including myself) put up with as normal.

I was reading a short piece in The New Yorker this week about City Island (off of The Bronx) when I got to this description of Hart Island, to the south.  

“Hart Island [...] currently contains a vast city-owned cemetery, a potter’s field, which is used for the internment of still-born infants, unclaimed and indigent people of all ages, and amputated limbs.  [...]  The burials are conducted by prisoners from Rikers Island.”  

I am reminded of the strange tasks that befell the occupants of the London workhouses and the market for goods that now seem more than slightly bizarre (bones and feces come to mind).  Whereas now amputated limbs are buried in a potter’s field (people don’t find it odd that part of them is in a pit with other people’s parts?) there might have been a market for them in the past, maybe with medical students.

I had a friend in college who worked at the infirmary at Rikers Island alongside her mother, like the Chiverys of Little Dorrit.  I asked her once what it was like, working in a prison, and I remember she just shrugged and said that it was O.K.  And that was that.  A job like any other, integrated into the life of the city.

The islands of New York City seem to be a sort of dumping ground for unpleasant government functions.  Caught between the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens, there lies Randalls Island.  It houses a city-run mental institution on one side, next to a renovated sports stadium.  After passing by it for years on the M60, I finally made it there, taking a friend along for maximum discoverability.  The hospital is the sort of institution that somehow managed to defy the mass closings of the 1970’s.  Maybe 10 to 15 stories high, with bars across the windows, it has a Soviet era feel to it.  I imagined that we’d hear tortured cries as we got closer, but no, no signs of life other than the subdued, recently released who were milling around one  of the island’s few bus stops.

The city, for all of its modernity, still bears its history as a part of everyday life.    What New York shares with 19th century London is the ability to seamlessly incorporate progress and decay, side by side.  That’s what makes it so interesting, at least to me.

Addendum:  Should have run this post through spell check earlier.  Oofta.