Talking Hart Island

Episode 39 “The Orphan Trains and Charles Loring Brace”: Michael T. Keene In 1848 Ireland was gripped by famine. Nearly a million people would die of starvation and typhoid Fever. Desperate for surviv...

Episode 38 “Lloyd “The Whistler” Threlkeld”: with Douglass Fraser, Professor and Musicologist. Lloyd Buford Threlkeld, also known as “The Whistler” for his ability to make sweet melodious sounds ...

Episode 37 “AIDS-The First Five Years”: with Jean Ashton, Director, New York Historical Society Resources & Programs. It is estimated that during the AIDS epidemic thousands of AIDS victims were ...

Episode 36 “Burial Grounds in a Segregated City”: with Tom Angotti, Professor Emertis, Hunter College. During the period of Dutch and English settlement, New York City was one of the nation’s lar...

Episode 35 “AIDS”: with Michael Bronsky, Professor, Harvard University. On a hot midsummer night in June of 1969, a group of police officers stormed into Greenwich Village’s tiny Stonewall Inn, o...

Episode 34 “Grave Yard of Strangers”: with Norma Jean Gradsky. Leo Birinski was a playwright, screenwriter and director. He worked in Austria-Hungary, Germany and in the United States. Birinski w...

Episode 33 “Angels of Mercy”: with William Seraile, Professor Emeritus, Lehman College, City University of New York. The Colored Orphan Asylum was founded, in New York City in 1836, as the nation...

Episode 32 “Boroughs of the Dead”: with Marie Carter, Editor, writer, teacher, and tour guide. When detectives and forensic scientists were called to investigate the Hart Island human remains, fo...

Episode 31 “Potters Field(s)”: with Andrew Berman, Executive Director, Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. By the early 1800’s New York City boasted a population of over 200,000,...

Episode 30 “Six to Celebrate” Simeon Bankoff, Executive Director of Historic District Council. In 2017 the annual “Six to Celebrate” initiative from the Historic Districts Council, highlighted si...

Episode 29 “Hebrew Free Burial Society”: with Amy Koplow, Executive Director. While many of the young women and men who perished in the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory Fire could be identified, many...

Episode 28 “Louisa Van Slyke”: with Author Gail Jarrow. The ship lurched in the heavy North Atlantic swell, its bow plunging deep in the troughs as it pitched sharply, its seasick passengers cram...

Episode 27 “Greta Garbo”: with Lois Banner, Professor (ret) USC. Leo Birinski was a playwright, screenwriter and director. He worked in Austria-Hungary, Germany and in the United States. Birinsk...

Episode 26 “Ghosts of St Vincents”: with Tom Eubanks. Founded in 1849 to care for indigent immigrants in Greenwich Village, St. Vincent’s Hospital was sold in 2010 to create multi-million-dollar ...

Episode 25 “The Tenement Museum”: with Kevin Jennings, Director. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, located at 97 and 103 Orchard Street, in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, New Y...

Episode 24 “Still Born”: with MJ Adams. Fifteen years after a Manhattan hospital sent her stillborn baby to New York City’s potter’s field for burial, MJ Adams heard the name Hart Island for the ...

Episode 23 “Leo Birinski”: with Barbara Kosta, Professor, University of Arizona. For a man with a little known history, no legitimate records to prove his place of birth, or even his date of birt...

Episode 22 “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Greatest Plague in History”: by John Barry, Author and historian. The influenza pandemic is believed to have killed somewhere between 50-100...

Episode 21 “The Bowery”; Dr. Robert Aronowitz, Physician and medical historian, University of Pennsylvania. “The Bowery is one of the oldest stretches of land in Manhattan, and was once a footpat...

Episode 20 “Ruth Proskauer Smith”: with Ian Dowbiggin, Professor at University of Prince Edward Island. Ruth Proskauer Smith, or Ruth P. Smith as she became more commonly known as, was a historic...

Episode 19 “Ship Ablaze”: with Edward T. O’Donnell, Professor Holy Cross University. There were few experienced swimmers, among the over 1,300 Lower East Side residents, who boarded the General S...

Episode 18 “Leonard Melfi”: with Edward Berkeley, Professor, The Julliard School. Leonard Melfi was revered by his peers as one of the most respected and creative playwrights of his generation. H...

Episode 17 “The Great Arrival”: with Diane Vecchio, Professor, Furman University. Most of this generation of Italian immigrants took their first steps on U.S. soil in a place that has now become ...

Episode 16 “Shelia Terry”: with Larry Powell, Professor, University of Alabama at Birmingham. American film actress Shelia Terry was a true Hollywood starlet of the 1930’s, starring in among other fil...

Episode 15 “The Manly Arts”: with Elliott J. Gorn, Professor, Purdue University. Well before Hart island became New York City’s potters field, Hart Island, or Hart’s Island as it was then called, beca...

Episode 14 “The Triangle Shirt Waist Factory Fire”: with Hasia Diner, Professor New York University. As historian Robert Hughes notes, “The Tenth Ward of Lower Manhattan—the Lower East Side—had by the...

Episode 13 “Leola Dickerson”: with Peter Strauss, Senior Partner at Pierro, Connor, and Strauss. She lay on the floor for three days. A slip and fall had rendered her helpless, at the mercy of fa...

Episode 12 “Bellevue”: with Dr. Danielle Ofri Essayist, editor, and practicing internist in New York City. How exactly did bodies end up on Hart Island? Their first stop use to be the Bellevue Hospita...

Episode 11 “Dawn Powell”: with Tim Page, Professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic, writer, and editor. Does the name Dawn Powell mean anything to you? I thought so. But you’re not alone. Ju...

Episode 10 “Damnation Island”: with Stacy Horn, Author. Purchased by the city in 1828, the island soon harbored an almshouse, an insane asylum, a hospital, a prison and a workhouse along its narr...

Episode 9 “A Pickpockets Tale”: with Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Professor, Loyola University. In George Appo’s world, child pickpockets swarmed the crowded streets, addicts drifted in furtive opium den...

Episode 8 “Inside Rikers: Stories From the World’s Largest Penal Colony”: with Jennifer Wynn, Professor, City University of New York. Wynn teaches a writing class to male inmates at Rikers Prison...

Episode 7 “Hart Island A Musical”: by Michelle Elliot and Danny Larsen. “Hart Island”, is the story of two people on the fringe of society. Their lives intersect on Hart Island, New York City’s public...

Episode 6 “Forgotten Ellis island”: with Lorie Conway. The lost story  the Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital saved tens of thousands of lives, as immigrants flooded onto Ellis Island over a century ago....

Episode 5 “Five Points”: with Professor Tyler Anbinder. By the late 1820’s the Five Points had already been considered a slum where poor immigrant and African American’s came to live and toil ami...

Episode 4 “Bobby Driscoll”: with Dave Bossert, Director/producer Disney Animation Studios. The clean cut child star with an impish, upturned nose, and beguiling expression was handpicked for an a...

Episode 3 “Superstorm”: with Dr. David A. Robinson, Professor at Rutgers University and the New Jersey Climatologist. What would become the largest Atlantic storm on record swirled violently from...

  Episode 2 “The Treasure of Hart Island”: A Novel, by Mike Monahan. Hart Island is haunted by the spirits of the dead. It is used as a potter’s field for indigenous peoples. Each grave is ...

Episode 1 “The Island at the Center of the World”: with Russell, Shorto Author, Historian, and Journalist. Before there was a Hart Island, even before there was a New York City, there was, “The Isla...

TALKING HART ISLAND “Talking Hart Island” is a half hour weekly podcast that explores the history of Hart Island, America’s largest mass graveyard. Hart Island has been used as New York City’s potter’...