New York City's potter's field, or public cemetery. The potter's field is variously described as the largest tax-funded cemetery in the United States, the largest-such in the world, and one of the largest mass graves in the United States. At least 850,000 have been buried on the island, though since the 2000s, the burial rate has declined to fewer than 1,500 a year. According to a 2006 New York Times article, there had been 1,419 burials at the potter's field during the previous year: of these, 826 were adults, 546 were infants and stillborn babies, and 47 were dismembered body parts. One-third of annual burials are infants and stillborn babies, which has been reduced from a proportion of one-half since the Children's Health Insurance Program began to cover all pregnant women in New York State in 1997. By the 2020s, those buried on the island came from a wider range of economic and social classes. In 2022, The Washington Post wrote that the island's recent interments included "a professional ballet dancer, a nurse, a software engineer, a scuba instructor and an acclaimed musical composer." Burials The dead are buried in trenches. Babies are placed in coffins, which are stacked in groups of 100, measuring five coffins deep and usually in twenty rows. Adults are placed in larger pine boxes placed according to size, and are stacked in sections of 150, measuring three coffins deep in two rows and laid out in a grid system. There are seven sizes of coffins, which range from long. Each box is labeled with an identification number, the person's age, ethnicity, and the place where the body was found, if applicable. Prior to civilian contractors doing the actual burials which began in 2020, inmates from the nearby Rikers Island jail were paid fifty cents an hour to bury bodies on Hart Island. The bodies of adults are frequently disinterred when families are able to locate their relatives through DNA, photographs and fingerprints kept on file at the Office of Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York. There were an average of 72 disinterments per year from 2007 to 2009. As a result, the adults' coffins are staggered to expedite removal. Children, mostly infants, are rarely disinterred. Regulations stipulate that the coffins generally must remain untouched for 25 years, except in cases of disinterment. Approximately half of the burials are of children under five