Two small, desolate isles near City Island are strictly off-limits to the public, but their weird pasts may have led four teens to try to explore them – and sealed the boys’ fate.
Hart and High islands, just off The Bronx’s southeast coast in Long Island Sound, are among the oddest isles in New York’s strange backwaters.
Hart Island, the larger of the two city-owned pieces of land, is now home to a potter’s field, where the city’s unclaimed bodies are laid to rest.
Inmates from the city jail at Rikers Island are ferried to it to dig the graves, which bear no markers. About 800,000 people are believed to be buried there.
The island used to be a livelier place, although it still featured much misery.
During the Civil War, it was the site of a prison camp for Confederate soldiers. At other times in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, the mile-long island contained a women’s poorhouse, an old-men’s home, an insane asylum and a reform school. It also was used to quarantine the sick during a yellow fever epidemic.
During World War II, the Navy kept disciplinary barracks there, and when a German U-boat was captured off New York’s coast, its crew was held on the island.
In 1955, the Army built a surface-to-air missile base on the island, but it was closed by the early 1960s.
The missile silos were left behind, and police searched them over the weekend in a futile effort to find the boys, who went missing apparently at sea after leaving a party on City Island.
Capping Hart Island’s sad history is some detritus from Brooklyn – the bleachers of Ebbets Field, which were dumped there after the Dodgers left for Los Angeles and their stadium was demolished.
High Island is smaller than Hart, and also has less history. The island is connected to City Island by a boardwalk, but like Hart is forbidden to casual visitors today.
In the not-too-distant past, people did live on High, but they were evicted in the 1960s when the city bought it so that radio towers could be built there. Those towers today are used to broadcast WFAN and WCBS radio.
In 1967, a small plane crashed into one of the towers during a storm, knocking out WCBS’s signal. All six passengers aboard died.