The plain wooden coffins are lowered, one by one, from the back of a morgue truck into the hands of waiting inmates, men standing in a pre-dug trench already filled with other bodies on a small, narrow strip of land off the coast of the Bronx. The only other people on the island – beside the inmates and the dead – are armed Department of Correction officers, overseeing this New York City burial as the rest of the nation's largest metropolis – almost wholly unaware this place exists – get ready for work.

This is just a regular Thursday on Hart Island, essentially the city's potter's field – though not all who end up here, it turns out, are destitute or unknown. The bodies are collected from the city morgues several times a week, ferried to a dock at the end of a residential street by a truck driver who alternately naps and drinks Dunkin Donut's coffee as he awaits the arrival of inmates from Rikers Island. Then the morgue truck and the inmates take a boat across the Long Island Sound, disembarking to drive along unpaved roads to open grave sites. Trenches ten feet deep are left open, week after week, until they're filled with 150 adult coffins, stacked three high, or 1,000 tiny pine boxes holding babies. Once the trenches are filled, the graves are covered in and eventually marked with nothing more than a stark white stake. The dead, on Hart Island, are nameless. It's the largest mass burial site in America.