The Moral Dilemma of Heart Island

In 1869, a 24-year-old woman named Louisa Van Slyke died of tuberculosis. Because she had no family in the States, sadly no one showed up to claim her body. New York was faced with a moral dilemma: Where do all the bodies go? The city set aside 45 acres of land at the northern end of Heart Island as a mass grave site for diseased people. By the early 1900s, Heart Island had gone through a bunch of facelifts, civil war camps, asylums, mass graves. One specific man saw an opportunity, an opportunity to build an amusement park on the island.