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Transcript126 lines
- [00:00]
Maddie
It's better over here now.
- [00:02]
Don Wildman
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- [00:09]
Kat Byers
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- [00:13]
Don Wildman
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- [00:31]
Kat Byers
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- [01:43]
Don Wildman
Hello folks. Welcome to American History Hit. I'm your host, Don Wildman, a proud citizen of the city of New York, where I've lived and worked for decades. Side by side with my fellow 8 million souls, it's by far the most populous city in the land. Not even close. Never mind the millions who come just to visit. With so much attention paid the place, you'd be hard pressed to find a stone unturned. Historically speaking. But that's where cat buyers comes in. In today's episode from our sister podcast After Dark, we're offering up a special gift on this Halloween Cat takes us to the streets and back alleys of the Big Apple, joining Anthony and Maddie to explore the grim and gruesome history of the New York morgue. Back in the late 19th century, New York prospered under the watchful eyes of industrial magnates and robber barons like John Jacob Astor, Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Iron pillared department stores loomed over the avenues as massive public works like the L and the Brooklyn Bridge transformed the landscape. But in the midst of all that seemed so gilded were the smudgy, smelly neighborhoods downtown. Slums like Five Points and Hell's Kitchen, where crime was rampant, disease was rife, and death was always right around the corner. So what's a city that never sleeps to do? Build hospitals, schools, hotels, libraries? Sure, certainly. But you also need a morgue. Oh, you'll definitely Nita Morg. Happy Halloween, everybody. Enjoy this episode of After Dark.
- [03:17]
Maddie
In an archive in Brooklyn, a box gathers dust. Each day, sunlight rises through the window, passes over the box, and then disappears, leaving it in darkness once again. Inside it are photographs, Photographs of the faces of the unclaimed dead of New York from the late 19th century. It was a time when the city's population was exploding, fueled by waves of immigrants washing ashore in search of a new life. With that tide, some were buoyed, rising to success and riches. Others found themselves desperate and drowning. Some themselves dead, their bodies left anonymous amid a sea of people, no one knowing who they were or where they'd come from. Corpses like these, the unnamed dead were taken to a dingy building on a pier at the foot of 26th Street. There they were laid out, and they were photographed. At first, the photos were displayed to the public. Some were pored over by anxious families searching for their missing loved ones. Others were overlooked, their subjects as alone in death as they had been in life. After a period, the images would be taken down. Eventually, they were put into a box and forgotten. But for those curious enough to lift the lid, these eerie works survive, handed down to us as the only witnesses we have of a changing populace and the institution that served them, one that no longer exists. Its records have been either locked away or consigned to the murky depths of the Hudson River. This is the story of New York's unknown dead and the building that processed them. This is the story of the New York morgue.
- [05:50]
Anthony
Welcome to After Dark. My name's Anthony.
- [05:53]
Maddie
And I'm Maddie. And as you can hear, we're both incredibly gravelly today.
- [05:57]
Anthony
And today we are on the edge of death because we are suffering with hay fever. And that's absolutely fine. But. But. And I'm so. I'm so genuinely glad about this. We have one of our favorite returning guests. All of our guests are favorites, but this is one of our particular favorite returning guests because this is one of my favorite episodes. And we are, of course, talking about Kat Byers, who's talked to us before. About the Paris morgue. And as Madd said, this time we're going to be talking about the New York morgue. So, Kat, welcome back to After Dark.
- [06:28]
Kat Byers
Thank you. I'm so glad to be back. Another day, another morgue. You know, that's my motto.
- [06:33]
Anthony
Another day, another morgue. Kat, give us a little bit of a. Because obviously we're in a whole different place here than we were when we spoke to you last about Paris. But give us a little bit of the context of the time and the place. Late 19th century America. What's the backdrop to the introduction of this morgue?
- [06:51]
Kat Byers
Yeah, so this morgue. So when we previously spoke about Paris, Paris opened in 1804, right at the beginning of the century. So we're now 50 years later, we're across the pond, we're in New York. And they first decided to open a morgue in New York in around 1865. And they'd kind of. They'd needed one for a long time. Like Maddie said at the beginning, you've got this huge population growth. All the kind of facilities that they had for, you know, managing the dead have become really, really insufficient. And there's all these reports of kind of the previous version of the morgue, which was basically just a shed in the summer. It would have all this, like. It was just. It was grim. There's all these reports of decomposing matter and like coffins half open and really grim. And there's also these potters fields that are moving around the city because Manhattan's growing and it's going upwards and upwards. And so they keep having to move all the cemeteries further upwards as well. So you've really got a situation where things are getting a bit out of hand and they need a solution. And what we've also got going on is the American Civil War has just finished. So you've kind of just got a country in chaos, a city that's been in chaos, and you're on the other side of it and you're in this whole new world. And it's a big moment for just change and for, I guess, experimenting and trying new things. And just how do we rebuild a new city, a new country, a new state, a new society, after everything that's just happened? And then into all this, we have this model of a morgue. And so what happened is they took the model directly from Paris. So there's this guy called John Bigelow, who was the sort of US Minister for France. And he literally took the plans, took the model, took it straight to New York and was like, right, let's just build the exact same thing in New York and see what happens.
- [08:34]
Maddie
You say there that, you know, this is an America coming out of the Civil War. And I suppose in a lot of ways, it was in America that was newly familiar with death, with what death looked like, with the smell of death, with bodies and being proximate to that and the processes that maybe surround that. So talk us through what the new morgue looks like. You say it was almost a direct blueprint transition from France into New York. But just tell us a little bit more about that building, what it would be like if we were standing in it today, for example.
- [09:07]
Kat Byers
So it was quite a lot smaller than the one in Paris. So they took the model and they took all the regulations and that kind of thing, but you had to adapt it to, again, an existing city, a totally different society, totally different, like, urban environment, municipality, all of that. And so they built it at Bellevue Hospital. So it was also attached to a hospital, which is not what you had in Paris. And so it was on the end of East 26th street, right next to the river, because obviously a lot of bodies would come in from the river. And also that meant that it was easily accessible to then transport the bodies to the mass graves on the island, people that were unclaimed where they would be buried. So there was a kind of a whole system there, and it was quite a low building. It went through various different versions. So every sort of 10 or 15 years or so, it would fall into absolute corruption and disrepair, and they'd try and fix it up. But the first version was quite small. It was slightly lower than ground level. So you would go down into it. And all the reports say it had obviously this quite overwhelming smell of damp from the river. And then in the summer, supposedly the smell was a little bit more than damp. I think one description said the overwhelming stench of death. So not particularly a nice place to be.
- [10:17]
Maddie
Not something you put on the tourist posters for New York.
- [10:20]
Kat Byers
No, not quite. Come and smell the stench of death this July. So similar to Paris, they had a display room. So you went in and there was kind of like, I guess, sort of like a walkway part of the room. And then there was a wall that had big glass windows, and you could look through them. And then through the windows, there were just four slabs laid out. And so these would have bodies on them. And the same with Paris, you'd have hooks behind the bodies to hang clothes on. And then also in the room where the public came, there was A wall. And this was called the Wall of the Unknown Dead. And so this is where these photographs would all be positioned. Once photography started, which was just two years after the morgue opened, they started taking photographs of the bodies. So these would all be on the wall there.
- [11:01]
Maddie
And this is the real difference, I suppose, isn't it, between the New York morgue and the Paris morgue? And for anyone who hasn't listened to the episode yet, pause it right now. We will wait for you to catch up. Go and listen to it, and we'll just give you a second. Okay, good. Hopefully you're back with us. So we've looked at death photography in the 19th century on this show before Cat, and that was very much photographers coming into people's homes or the dead being taken to photography studios. And there was a sort of stillness to that, but also an intimacy. And it's quite emotionally coded. And I just wonder if that's the same thing that's going on in the morgue or if this is a more sort of clinical process. What is the function of those photographs?
- [11:43]
Kat Byers
It is absolutely a much more clinical focus. And I remember your postmortem photography episode. I really enjoyed that one. In this case, obviously, the function is to try and identify the dead. So it's kind of actually the inverse if we think of postmortem photography, which is trying to remember people that you knew in life here, the absolute opposite is trying to discover who they are. And the person taking the photograph and the people looking at them have no idea who this person is. So it really is the kind of. Yeah, the direct opposite of it. And the photographer was a man named Oscar G. Mason, and he had actually been and was the hospital photographer. So in this period as well, we've got this absolute growth of medical photography. And the US really kind of led the way in that. In a lot of ways, partly because of the Civil War and because of all these sort of army hospitals and the photography that was happening there. And so Mason was then brought in to photograph the bodies at the morgue because they thought, this is great. If we take pictures of people who are not too far decomposed, who are still recognizable, put them on the wall. This gives us a much better chance of being able to identify people, especially because they had much more limited facilities for display. And display was also never popular in New York in the way it was in Paris. It never became this big, popular, great tourist place to go. It was always seen as, like, just a ghastly place that you don't really want to hang out in. And so, yeah, they started taking these photographs and they're also really interesting because in some ways their sort of medical photographs, because obviously Mason's a medical photographer and there's that kind of clinical detachment to them. But then they also really remind us of criminal mug shots. And there's that feeling as well there. And what's also in New York, there's a kind of a pre existing idea of having photographs like this on display because 10 years before the morgue, the police had started this kind of rogues gallery mug shop place where basically people could go and see these photographs of, you know, this is a petty criminal, this is a shoplifter, this is so and so and so people could kind of know who the local criminals in the neighborhood were and all this kind of idea. So there's already a prerequisite for doing that. So that kind of comes into it as well. So they do. They kind of combine medical slash criminal, but also postmortem, because these are photographs of the dead. And the photographer himself was really aware of that. And he writes about the photographs and these annual reports, and he's really sensitive to it and he's very much aware of like, we're trying to find, you know, their kin, we're trying to find out who these people are, whereas other people maybe weren't so. So sensitive about it, I suppose as.
- [14:09]
Maddie
Well, the photographs halt the decomposition process. And so you can identify a body for a lot longer. It can go off display and you still have that record of them. Just before we're going to talk about some of these photos. But I just wanted to ask really quickly, while it's in my mind, you mentioned there, that whereas the Paris morgue is very much a tourist attraction and part of a sort of pantheon of activities you could do in the city, in New York, you say it's considered a ghastly place and somewhere that people don't want to go to. And I wonder if, is that a cultural difference? Is it a difference between the beginning and the end of the 19th century? Is it this association that's starting to slip in in terms of criminality and that the photographs are making that link between criminality and the bodies in the morgue. Is it all of that? Is it none of that? What's going on? Why is there that difference?
- [14:59]
Kat Byers
You know, that's a great question, because we don't know. And I think the thing is about this morgue, especially because it's never been studied before now, is that a lot of these aspects Especially things like figuring out why wasn't the display popular there? It could be and probably was partly because of all the reasons you've just listed. I think there was a cultural element, there was a social element. You've got a kind of a different religious sensibility in the US as compared to France. You've also got, like you say this is now mid century. We've again just come out of the Civil War. Is there a sense of being like, I don't really want to go and see dead bodies on display? That's not perhaps interesting to me or entertaining in a way. It might have been before. But then at the same time, the Paris more kind of emerged out of the French Revolution. So maybe it's also. Yeah, maybe it's more having a kind of puritanical background culturally. Also, it was a smaller space. It was not as centrally located in the way that Paris was. There's so many different possibilities. And also, what's odd in New York is that the photography becomes much more the thing to go and see in Paris. That was like, sort of secondary to the bodies. You wanted to go see the bodies for real. You weren't that bothered about the photos. But in New York, you'll find in sort of in the newspapers, they're often talking about photographs and calling, yeah, this ghastly display, this, you know, this wall of the unknown dead. Who's in the photos this week? So there is more, much more interest in the photos and who's up there. And they also kept photographs for a really long time. By the end of the period, there was 600 photos up there. So the display would get bigger and bigger and they would keep. Yeah, they would keep images up for quite a long time, depending on how much space they had. So that was a bit more of a draw. And I mean, there still obviously were people who went to go and see it because it was somewhere you could go and see dead bodies. I mean, there's occasion descriptions of, like, kids hanging outside and that kind of thing. And there were some people who wrote about the fact that people would go there as like a ghoulish tourist attraction, but it was never a big, big international hotspot in the way that Paris was.
- [16:56]
Anthony
Well, we have one of those photographs which Kat has provided for us, and I'm going to try and give you a sense of it. And then, Kat, if you can. If you can share the details that you know, because I know you've done some research on this, it is a black and white photograph of a man who for all intents and purposes, if I didn't know what I was looking at, seems to me to be alive. There's a liveliness about him, despite the fact that his eyes are closed. He seems to be. And obviously this is just human inference here. He seems to be a very kindly man. There's something very light about him. What I would ask you to imagine is a version of Charles Dickens almost. It's very Dickensian in how he looks.
- [17:37]
Maddie
He does look like Charles Dickens.
- [17:38]
Kat Byers
Yeah, he does, he does. I think it's the goatee.
- [17:41]
Anthony
Yes. Yeah. I think it's the facial hair and then the receding hairline. At the same time. He's dressed relatively well, although his clothes seem to be quite smudged, a little bit tattered now. But it's, you know, he's wearing a three piece suit, he's wearing a tie, which they've obviously put him back into for the purposes of this photograph. And yeah, he seems like a kindly older man, although not that old. This is a fascinating photo and you can see I'm always really reticent to cast judgment. You know, the way we spoke about this at Paris, where people are just like, well, I'd never go and see and I'd never. And when you look at an image like this, you can see why it would intrigue people and why it would fascinate people. But tell us about this image, this man. Do we know anything about him?
- [18:23]
Kat Byers
Yeah. So this photograph is one of hundreds of photographs that I found in that box in the Brooklyn Archive. And, yeah, it's incredible. He does look really lifelike. And this is something that we see in quite a lot of the photographs is that they look like they're asleep. And you assume that photographs of dead people, they're all going to look a specific way, but actually there's a huge range in how people look. And in this case. So the photographs in this box that I found, they have notes on the back and they have notes saying where the body was found, if they were identified or not, you know, a signature of the coroner at the time. And in this case, this man was identified. And we know that he was 45 years old. He was five foot eight. Yeah.
- [19:00]
Anthony
He's only 45.
- [19:02]
Kat Byers
Yeah. Hard living in New York, it's going to age you.
- [19:07]
Anthony
We'll share this picture on socials just so that you can, you can see why were reacting like that. I mean, I thought he was maybe in his 60s.
- [19:15]
Kat Byers
No, he's only 45.
- [19:16]
Anthony
Wow.
- [19:17]
Kat Byers
And there's a description of what he's wearing, you know, his waistcoat and his jacket and his linen undershirt and his boots. And he was found at the foot of Spring street, which is in Lower Manhattan. And he was brought to the morgue, and I think it was February 1870. So again, pretty early on in the morgue's history. And then he was identified in July of that year. So the photograph must have been up for a while. And obviously by that time, you know, he was long gone. He was buried. And his name was Peter Van Guthrin. There was a name for the person that identified him. We can only assume that they were a friend or a family member. But yeah, so we knew. Know exactly who he was in that image. And I think with these. With all these images, obviously a lot of them weren't identified, but other ones were. And it's incredible because you just get this tiny snippet of somebody and you. You only have their death. We don't have anything about their life. We don't know anything about them. And, you know, this is just this one moment, this last moment, and that's all we have of them.
- [20:11]
Maddie
It's fascinating, isn't it, how we can guess at elements of his life based on the clothing that he's wearing or indeed his facial hair. And there are little ways that you could read, you know, maybe what social class he was from or potentially the kind of job he might have done or something like that. But ultimately we will never be able to color in that whole picture. And that's. That's so fascinating. Kat, I'm wondering, while you're talking there, I was just thinking, does it matter when these people are identified? You say that in the case of Peter here, that he was already buried, that his photograph had been up for a really long time before anyone came forward and said who he was. So what would happen if someone was already buried and then they were identified? Would there be a headstone, for example, given to their grave? Were they marked in an unmarked grave? And then that's it, that no one ever visits when they're buried or speaks about them again, what was the purpose of identifying them? Who was it for?
- [21:08]
Kat Byers
Well, I suppose it matters to the people that knew him. So I think in a case of something like this, there isn't any suggestion that there was foul play or suspicion around the death. If there had been, then it would be okay. And then we can try and figure out who killed him, what happened, what the crime was. In this case, it was a drowning. You know, maybe it was a tragic accident. We don't know exactly what caused the drowning to happen, but there wasn't any inference that somebody else was involved. And so in that sense, it would matter to the people that knew him and who were missing him, who didn't know what happened to him. And so perhaps the body also mattered to them. We don't know. The body at that point would be in a mass grave. They're probably not keeping great records of where, which exact plot. I mean, even these days, they struggle sometimes to keep. I mean, it's gotten a lot better. But even yet, late into the 20th century, they were struggling to figure out who was where in the city cemetery. So the likelihood of you being able to get that body back, I also, on a practical level, I don't know if you'd want that body back. It's been like five months. So I think it is. It's probably much more just about knowing who he was and what happened to him and knowing where he ended up and not having, I guess, that kind of just empty space or that hole or that question still in your mind, if he was somebody that was in your life of where did he go and what happened to him?
- [22:20]
Anthony
What's fascinating, Kat, I think about your research specifically, and then how we on this podcast, and then people who are listening discuss. This is so much can be said about how we live in relation to how we treat our dead, I think, and that occurs to me. I'm always really fascinated and struck and sometimes, sometimes I'll be honest, sometimes appalled about the way the dead are treated in Britain in terms of the length of time that can pass between a death and then the formalization of the burial or, you know, it's often weeks. And I know in Ireland we have a much, much quicker system. And I always feel that it helps in the grieving process to do that much more quickly. And obviously these people are missing out on that grieving process because, as you say, the body has gone. But what do you think it tells us about and what do you think the dead can tell us about the living in that sense, rather than trying to piece together the clues about what these people were like in life? How do attitudes pinpoint us towards the attitudes of the living at this point? How does it reflect that?
- [23:29]
Kat Byers
Yeah, I mean, I think that, like you say, is so central to this. It's not about trying to track down who all these individual people are. It's like, what does this say about society, about the living, about who you prioritize, about who you marginalize, who gets to matter and who doesn't? And I totally agree. I think that even today, death is still. So it's not really democratic, is it? In so many ways, because I think that it's expensive. The burial process is expensive, the death process is expensive, all of that stuff. And I think a lot of people are still really marginalized by that. And in the period especially this is when you've got this growing interest in kind of funeral pomp and all the money in it, and, you know, how you die and how you are sort of how your death is memorialized is a massive reflection of who you were in life. And that's this big societal and cultural idea. So you're kind of like reinforcing that you didn't matter in life because not only can you not, you know, afford a nice funeral pump, you are quite literally in a mass grave on an island and nobody knows who you are. And so there's this. That really reinforces that. And the island that they ended up on, Hart island at the time, also had a reputation for just being awful. And there was all these news reports of, like, dogs getting into the graves and just really awful, disrespectful, dehumanizing stuff. And so it very much was this idea of, this is all you're worth. This is all you're worth. You weren't worth much in life, and you're definitely not worth much now. And you're going to end up in this mass grave and you're going to be disrespected. And I think this is this idea that, you know, if you were marginalized or you impoverished or you were perhaps, you know, had any association with any criminality, that's what you deserved. That's that, you know, you. You didn't contribute socially in the way that you were supposed to, or, you know, maybe you sort of quote, you know, took handouts. They're not handouts, but, you know, you had state assistance in some way, or you were in an institution, in a penitentiary or workhouse or anything. So you don't get more than this. Like, you know, you actually owe the state. So don't expect to get anything back. And there's this real sense of that in the kind of cultural, moral and social ideology of the time.
- [25:36]
Maddie
Let's talk a little bit more about the institution itself then, and the treatment of the dead, because there aren't that many records that survive relating to the New York morgue. We do have some photographs, and I'm going to describe this photo that I'm looking at. And Then maybe we can talk about why those records are a little bit patchy. So the photograph that is in front of me is, I believe, from 1879. And it sort of looks a little bit like a school gym. And on the floor, which almost looks like it's wet, maybe that's the damp, maybe it's just been washed, which I suppose would be a constant thing that would need to happen in the morgue. On the floor level, or raised slightly up, in what look like little sort of stands, are many, many, many wooden coffins organised in rows. But what's really confusing me is that at the back of this scene, almost like a stage in a school again, a school hall, a school gymnasium, there seemed to be what look like. And cat. You're gonna have to clarify this for me. The skeletons, the reassembled skeletons of different, possibly exotic animals. There's what looks like an elk, possibly, or at least a deer. There's some kind of bird with a very long neck that could be an ostrich. What on earth is going on?
- [27:03]
Kat Byers
Well, actually, it was the animals that helped me find this photograph. It's a weird way to start it, but basically this is a photograph of the dead house, of the morgue, which is basically the storage room where all the coffins are. And I had been looking for this photograph for a really long time. So, as you say, not a lot of stuff remains of the New York morgue. And there's all these complications with archives, and everything I use is stuff that basically has kind of escaped and disappeared off into other places and papers and architectural plans and photographs and all these different things. It's a real. Like cobbling it together. So often I will go off down an absolute rabbit hole for a very long time trying to find something. In this case, there was a man named Jacob Riis. He was quite a famous social reformer. Effectively at the end of the 19th century. He wrote this book called how the Other Half Live. And he was one of the first people in that period to sort of go into tenement housing and slums and photograph things and kind of just sort of reveal what was going on. And I'd read somewhere that he'd also taken photographs of the morgue and that he'd done this presentation once called how the Other Half Die. And there'd been these morgue photographs. And I'd been trying to figure out where this photograph had gone for a really long time. And I just assumed it was gone forever. I was never going to find it. And when I was in New York, it Was about a year ago, I'd just been in the archive reading about an anatomy museum that they built above the morgue. So quite early on, they decided to take the space above the morgue and the top two floors they turned into, yeah, this comparative anatomy museum, which were all quite popular at the time. And they were seen as these educational sites. Well, you had the sort of the public facing ones which were a bit more like sort of these crazy spectacles. And then you had the sort of more serious medical ones. So it was for doctors in the hospital to come and study the specimens. And they had both animals and human remains. And I'd just been reading about that and then I was flicking through this book in a shop about Jacob Riis, and then I saw this photograph and I was like, hang on, that room looks really familiar. And then I realized I'd seen a drawing of it in an illustration of the morgue. And then I saw the animals at the back and I looked at the date and I was like, oh, oh my God. It's because they're installing new animals in the anatomy room above. So then I contacted the Library of Congress, which is where the photograph was kept, and I was like, weird question, guys. So if you got any photographs of this morgue? Because I found this picture and I'm convinced it's the morgue. I don't know if it is. Like, do you have any record of this picture? Do you have any others from the series? And it turned out that this photograph had been kind of misfiled somewhere else and had been labeled as a storage room. Because if you don't think about it, you would not assume that those are all coffins and you wouldn't assume that this is a morgue. And so, yeah, then they showed me some other photographs from a different angle. And then I also sent them an etching I had that proved it was the same room because it was a drawing that had the same ceiling. All of that. That is how we track down the photo. One of the few photographs of the New York morgue.
- [29:50]
Maddie
I adore research stories like that so much, but I think as well, it says so much about the equation, I suppose, of some human remains with the animal remains. And there's questions there about the ethics of storage and the ethics of display. And the morgue as an example exhibition space, like the museum above it as well. There are some other things that I want to bring up from the stories that come out of the morgue. One of them is a headline from the New York World, which was published on the 25th of May, 1894. And I'm just going to read this, and then I'm going to let you explain this story, Cat, because this is quite remarkable. The headline says used corpses for targets. Ghastly Experiments made by Dr. Phelps Morgue Unclaimed Bodies won't be fired at again To Benefit Sciences. It's a nice reassurance that it's okay. They won't be fired at again. So people are firing, presumably guns at bodies.
- [30:51]
Kat Byers
Yeah, I mean, you know, it must have been a slow day in the morgue that day. Gotta keep busy somehow. So basically, the morgue, in the same way that it happened in Paris, but very much in New York, was also a place for a lot of kind of medical and scientific experimentation because you had all these bodies that a lot of people weren't going to claim that people didn't effectively really care about. And you could. They were just, you know, perfect in the eyes of the time, material to test things out of. So this, this was a case where, yeah, they were basically just propping up bodies in the storeroom and shooting at them so that then they could analyze gunshot wounds and. And the impact of bullets. So there was quite a lot of examples of. Of this. Not all as extreme as quite literally shooting bodies in the storeroom. But there's a lot of medical developments that came onto the morgue. The first ever skin graft from a dead person to a living person in the US Happens with a body from the morgue that is also just a footnote in a medical journal. You know, the doctors being like, I've done this amazing thing. I've made this skin graft. It's worked. I found a random guy in the morgue that no one's claimed. So I've just took some of his skin and I put it on this kid and look, it's worked.
- [31:58]
Maddie
Wow.
- [31:59]
Kat Byers
Okay. So, yeah, there's a lot of, you know, and then also in medical journals and things like that, people talking about how great the morgue was because there were so many cases that they could analyze and there were so many. Yeah, different types of bodies that would also come in from the hospital, different pathologies and also violent deaths, suspicious deaths, autopsies.
- [32:16]
Anthony
So you have an awful lot going on then, Kat. It's really clear that a lot is going on there. So I just want to tie two pieces of that information together, all of this happening. And then now we have a relative sparsity of documentation that lead us back to that. Is that an administrative thing? Were these Deliberately destroyed. What's the gap between what was happening then and what we have access to now?
- [32:39]
Kat Byers
It's a couple of different factors, depending on how suspicious you want to be. Basically, let's say very. Let's say very. Okay, let's go with the deep conspiracy theory. So one of the problems I have is that the hospital where the morgue was located, Bellevue Hospital is still around today, has a, I want to say, notorious history. Quite a lot of bad and dark things happened. They had a very notorious psychiatric division. Sometimes I would come across clippings in the newspaper about nurses murdering a patient. You know, there was. There was lots of. Lots of bad stuff happening at Bellevue. And they technically have an archive, but if you ask them, they will say that they do not. And I had somebody once give me a list of stuff that had been in a catalogue at the archive that they now also are like, no, no, no, I don't know what you're talking about. We don't have that. And then there's also the fact of Hurricane Sandy, and stuff did probably get destroyed during Hurricane Sandy. So that can also be something where you're like, oh, no, everything is gone. Sorry, don't look at us. So that's a factor. And then there's also a factor of things just gradually getting destroyed for, I guess, normal reasons. History, time, storage, things get lost. It's been hundreds of years. Most people don't think of keeping morgue registers as a priority. I obviously would, but I think, you know, a lot of stuff disappears for reasons that aren't nefarious. And then there's also the police side of stuff. So anything that's linked to police in New York, quite a lot of stuff did just get thrown in the river. So there was a bit of a thing where after a case was finished, apparently they sometimes did just used to throw all the files in the river that would happen. There was also just an incredible amount of corruption in every part of the morgue and the municipality and politics and everything in New York in this period. So I think people were also just destroying their own records, too. So, yeah, it's a complex web of reasons why a lot of stuff is missing. Which means when I do find stuff, like finding the photographs, that was incredible. I mean, they also had been at the back of a warehouse for a really long time, and it took the archive a year to track them down for me, not because they'd gone missing, but just because they have so much stuff. Yeah. So it's a complex journey, I would say, to researching this morgue.
- [35:08]
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- [36:22]
Anthony
I'm Matt Lewis.
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Kat Byers
And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga.
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Maddie
And in Gone Medieval we get into.
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Kat Byers
The greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by.
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Maddie
Subscribing to Gone Medieval from History.
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Kat Byers
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Kat Byers
Not sure what that means?
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Don Wildman
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Kat Byers
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Don Wildman
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Kat Byers
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Don Wildman
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Kat Byers
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Don Wildman
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- [38:02]
Anthony
One of the things that strikes me with a bit of 18th century knowledge about death Dying and the business of death is that this will open up inevitably an opportunity for some, let's say illegal or immoral, at the very least, practices to unfold. And I think Maddie is going to lead us into one of those examples.
- [38:21]
Kat Byers
And then we'll.
- [38:22]
Anthony
When we come back, we'll discuss with Kat in a little bit more detail.
- [38:28]
Maddie
Here's an arithmetic problem for you. Pencils and paper at the ready, please. Albert N. White held the solemn office of the keeper of the New York morgue for 25 years. Then one night, he died of a heart attack. White had helped usher more than 50,000 corpses through the morgue, for which he'd received a modest stipend of $700 per annum. Reports often found him asleep in his chair while the bodies came in. But on his death, it was discovered that his estate was worth around $100,000. Clearly, the dead had been enriching White beyond all lawful measure. One doctor admitted buying corpses for White. He said they were delivered on express wagons packed in wicker baskets lined with zinc. He said he paid White $6 per corpse. Another doctor said he paid $3,000 to White for a bulk deal at an average price of $10 per corpse. $6 a body here, $10 there. 25 years on the job and tens of thousands of of dead souls to plunder. Just how many bodies did Morg Keeper White sell to the voracious anatomists of New York City? Well, can I just say, as someone who is numerically very challenged, that I've come out in a cold sweat having to read that narrative.
- [40:05]
Anthony
But I followed. But I followed your instruction. I did write some of those numbers down.
- [40:10]
Maddie
Oh, wow.
- [40:10]
Anthony
What have you done? Don't get excited, Kat. I haven't watched anything out. So just. All I have is the number she said that we're going to recount over.
- [40:17]
Kat Byers
Again just to make sure that they're right.
- [40:19]
Anthony
So it was 25 years. He would have seen through 50,000 bodies. His actual salary was $700 per year. But when he died, his estate was worth $100,000. And then after his death, some doctors came out and said he was selling corpses to them for somewhere between $610 per corpse and that he was bulk selling.
- [40:47]
Maddie
I know.
- [40:48]
Anthony
For $3,000.
- [40:50]
Maddie
That tipped me over the edge. The bulk buy. It's shocking, but it's not surprising. We've, you know, we've looked a lot at body snatchers and the, as you say, Anthony, the business of death. The money that was to be made in the 18th and in the 19th centuries in dealing with anonymized bodies. People who'd slipped from the public record in some way. The marginalised, the people who were maybe living on the street, who died in ways that meant nobody would miss them. And this is often what happened. And also especially in terms of the 18th century, of course, once you were buried in the ground, whether you were a duchess or a pauper, you might be snatched. So there was a sort of, I suppose, a social democracy happening there, a sort of an evening out, I suppose, of hierarchy. But this is obviously happening on a slightly more institutionalized, organized scale at this point in the New York morgue. So, Kat, what's going on?
- [41:52]
Anthony
Wait, wait, Kat, don't answer just yet. Because exciting developments unfolding as we speak. I did the maths.
- [41:58]
Kat Byers
Okay.
- [41:58]
Anthony
I did the maths.
- [41:59]
Maddie
I'm so impressed.
- [42:00]
Anthony
It is my estimation based on his estate being worth $100,000 that you're looking at him having sold. I averaged the price of about $8 per corpse.
- [42:11]
Kat Byers
Okay.
- [42:11]
Anthony
That he will have sold somewhere around the 12 to 12 and a half thousand bodies in order to. So that's probably like what, a quarter? Well, a little quarter of the bodies.
- [42:25]
Maddie
That have passed through them.
- [42:26]
Anthony
All cats nodding. Because I feel like you probably some of this.
- [42:30]
Maddie
Listen, kind of just like Kat looks so unsurprised by this.
- [42:34]
Kat Byers
Yeah, she's like.
- [42:34]
Anthony
Yeah, that sounds, that sounds about right.
- [42:36]
Maddie
Right.
- [42:36]
Anthony
Sorry, I'm just, just, just. It's, it's actually startling. It's, it's incredible.
- [42:41]
Kat Byers
Yeah. Because also, I mean, if we're really going to get into accounting here, he's got expenses, you know, he's got expenses of the wagon transporting. He's also not the only person involved in this. So, you know, he's probably sold even more because if we think about it, you know, he's got some overheads, he's got other people to pay off. There's a lot of other people that are also in this business. This is not a one man, one man show. Although obviously when he goes to trial, they are very much trying to pretend that it's a one man show, which is why he never does go to prison because there's too many other people involved. But yeah, like you say, I think, you know, body snatching bodies are valuable in this period for medical study and people will go to whatever lens to get them. And if there are people who are vulnerable or marginalized or who it's much easier to just take their bodies and do what you want with them, people are going to absolutely take advantage of that. And in this case, they certainly did. And way better to operate this than literally out of the morgue. If you're the keeper, you can manage this. And there's, you know, there was some newspaper accounts about how he. We had the official register and then he had his own personal register of where the bodies were supposed to go and then where they actually went.
- [43:51]
Maddie
That's interesting that he was keeping his own records.
- [43:54]
Kat Byers
Oh yeah, I think, I mean, he did it for 25 years. He was good at it. You know, I don't think you could run what is essentially a commercial enterprise for that long without, you know, really having some good business skills there. And I think he definitely did. And there was absolutely quite a lot of other people involved. And they also. People knew about it. There's interesting is that the trial happened in the 1890s, right at the end. But he. There was, you know, there's mentions of these dodgy dealings in the morgue in like the 1870s. There's this whole Senate document which actually is about other messed up stuff happening at the morgue to do with necrophilia and theft and embezzlement and corruption and, you know, you name it, that happened at the morgue. And there's kind of a bit of a subtext there where you're like, oh, yeah, there's a hint that people know that he's taking a tip, but he's, you know, he's maybe good at what he does in other ways. They're overseeing it and they're overlooking it as a bit of a, like, okay, you know, that's the price of it, like a little bit of a gratuity. And I think what happens with the trial is more that the hires up are pissed off that he's the one that's making loads of money off it because he's just a lowly morgue keeper. It's not fair that he's getting rich. You know, if you think about the class element of this and the social element, it's fine for the doctors and everybody to get rich off this. It's fine for people who are perhaps of a higher class or higher status than Albert Napoleon White to be getting rich. But for this guy to get rich in their eyes, that's not really appropriate. And he also has the most crazy life story. I've been trying to track him down and he's just like.
- [45:18]
Maddie
Yeah, I was gonna ask, apart from like, side note, Napoleon, fantastic middle name. Without giving him too much airtime. Cause he sounds like a pretty dreadful person. But how does one become keeper of the New York morgue? What was his story?
- [45:29]
Kat Byers
How he became the morgue keeper? I have no idea. And I really do want to, when I have more time, fully dig into that. But what I do know about him, he was born in Canada and then he moved, he changed his name, moved to the U.S. joined the Civil War, and then after the Civil War somehow ended up in a job in the morgue. I don't think it was particularly hard to get a job at the morgue. I'm also going to say that.
- [45:51]
Maddie
But I think there weren't many candidates.
- [45:53]
Kat Byers
Yeah, I think if you needed some work and maybe you were quite like a, like a physical guy and you could, I mean it was quite a physical job and you were fine with sort of managing dead people all day. I don't think the interview process was probably that stringent. And so then he joined the morgue there and then he had quite a few children. And then I found that his wife died of an illegal abortion in the 1880s, which in itself is a whole odd thing to have happened. You know, when we think about how dangerous abortion was in that period and how it obviously it was very much illegal and he was married and already had children. So there's. And they obviously at this point clearly had a fair amount of money because he's been selling bodies for 15 years already. So there's an interesting element there of like, okay, what's, what's going on here? How has this happened? And then he remarries six months later, her 16 year old sister. Either it's her sister or it's a young woman that was living in their house. She's referred to as the sister, but we don't know exactly who she is. And then he has some more, some more children.
- [46:50]
Maddie
I don't know why I didn't expect his terrible behavior to extend to his domestic life, but there we go.
- [46:57]
Kat Byers
Yeah, Albert Napoleon. And also what's interesting about him, probably no surprise here, but all the pre trial there's all these, you know, they interview him now and again in the newspaper and he comes up a lot because he's the kind of jolly morgue keeper and he's a great character and oh, he's a great guy. And there's this whole, I don't know, they portray him in the press as this sort of cheerful, hearty morgue man.
- [47:20]
Maddie
Cat, before we wrap up, I want to ask, first of all, we've talked about a lot of the unclaimed bodies from the morgue end up in an area called Potter's Field. And I want to ask, is that a place that is still a gravesite today? Can people go and visit it? And then I also want to ask. We've spoken a little bit about. Was it, Peter, I think the man in the photograph who was dead. But are there any other stories that have come out of the New York morgue that have really stayed with you or that you'd like to mention?
- [47:52]
Kat Byers
So in terms of the Potter's Field. So basically, Potter's Field is the term for, you know, a pauper graveyard, the city cemetery. And in New York, this is a place called Hart island, which is still there today. Over a million New Yorkers are buried there. And it. Yeah, it still operates like that today. There was a big shift a couple of years ago. So until about two or three years ago, it was still run by the Department of Corrections. So it was still run, quite literally, by the prison department. The bodies were interred by incarcerated people from Rikers island being paid 50 cents an hour. Like, it really. The system from 150 years ago had just continued. And then there's been a huge amount of activism around the island for the last maybe 20 years. There's a great organization called the Hart Island Project, who have done so much work in raising awareness for the island and for the people who were buried there. But it's still. It's still functioning, and it got taken over by the Department of Parks again a couple years ago. And so the legislation has been shifting all the time then, obviously during COVID as well, but they're trying to make it more accessible and so that people can go and visit. And I went there a couple of years ago, which was just. Yeah, very kind of an incredible experience to see what it's actually like. And there's also been quite a lot of work being done to kind of lift the stigma of ending up in a mass grave on this island. And the fact that it shouldn't be a huge stigma and that a lot of people, again, can't afford or don't want to pay for, you know, for a burial for this kind of. Yeah, for a traditional individual burial. But, yeah, Hart island is still there, still there in the Long Island Sound. And they also. There was obviously a lot of attention on the island during COVID because a lot of bodies were temporarily interred on the island when they were managing the rising death toll. And that's also when a lot of attention was put on the island and people realized that incarcerated people from Rikers island were still being used to Bury the bodies. And then that shifted. And so now there are independent outside contractors. In 2020, they were still using incarcerated labor. And that's an interesting thing with the morgue and this network as well, is that historically that was also part of it, is that the morgue and the penitentiary institutions and the workhouses and the asylums and the prisons were all under the same department. So you would literally have people in the workhouses building coffins, sewing shrouds, sometimes going to the morgue to help. So there was this whole going to the morgue to help, being sent to the morgue. So, yeah, you'd have people effectively building their own coffins and sewing their own shards in that period. And they also used clothing from the unclaimed dead that was in, you know, not great condition. They would shred it and make it into carpets for prisons and asylums and workhouses. So, yeah, it's a real sort of circular economy system going on.
- [50:29]
Maddie
Yeah, it's a sort of closed loop circuit, isn't it, that you can get stuck in. And it's a hopeless situation that in the 19th century at least, there was no escape. And it's shocking that echoes of that system and the infrastructure are still in place, at least were in 2020. It's really, really remarkable. But even though there are these echoes, the morgue itself is closed today, isn't it, Kat? So when did that happen? When did that institution close its doors?
- [50:56]
Kat Byers
Yeah, so they went, as I said, during the kind of the period from like the 1860s to the 1910s, they would kind of try and reform it every 10 or 15 years and then it would just fall into absolute chaos and disrepair again. So it was kind of going over and over again. But then in the 1910s, they did this massive overhaul of the hospital and the famous McKim, Mead and White architects designed this whole new, you know, kind of new facility. And they ended up designing a brand new pathology building and the morgue was incorporated into that. So it was this big six story, fancy new building. They even had. They had an embalming room. They had all the morgue staff. They had all these autopsy spaces, forensics sort of lesson spaces. They even had a floor full of like animals for animal testing. I mean, there's a. I find the architectural plans as like a whole, yeah, really fancy new building. They put loads of money into it. And so that's when we see this moment of it shifting away from the morgue and becoming this real sort of medical legal institute that's really medicalized. And they're kind of putting all the previous dark, dingy stuff behind them and starting fresh and also coinciding with this period. So previously you had the coroner system in New York with death management. And the coroner system was also notoriously, again, surprise, incredibly corrupt. And so this is also the period when they end the coroner system and they start having a chief medical examiner instead. So they have this whole medical examiner system that's brought in. And although, you know, the pathology and morgue buildings have gone through various changes since then, the office of the chief medical examiner is still located at Bellevue in the exact location that the morgue once was. And this is the, as I think, as far as I know, the largest chief medical examiner's office in the US Huge. And they still obviously do a lot of kind of investigations there, a lot of developments there. So this is. Any suspicious deaths in New York come through this building, and it's a massive. Yeah, massive institution. And it's exactly where the morgue was. And there's this whole, you know, because there's been so little study in this area, slash none. When people talk about kind of the beginnings of the chief medical examiner and the first guy that came in and all his advances in forensics and medical legal stuff, they sort of talk about it as if he just woke up one day and invented all of it. Because the previous system just had such a bad reputation that everyone kind of forgets that any developments happened. But instead he took over an existing system. Like they updated it. But the kind of the New York morgue was really the origins of all of that stuff and all the advancements they were making. And then when they swept it away, they were like, right, let's just forget that ever happened. We've got a brand new building, a brand new guy. Let's start from here.
- [53:34]
Anthony
Well, let's not forget that that just ever happened. So as a parting. As a parting blow, I'd love you, Kat, just to recount maybe one story or history or tale or whatever it might be that's attached to the 19th century morgue, just to leave us with that kind of lasting impression of the place and the institution and the types of people that pass through.
- [53:55]
Kat Byers
Gosh, there are so many different stories, including some dark but surreal ones. There's one involving this woman, her husband, her boyfriend, her second boyfriend, a duck. There's this crazy murder case. There's a lot, you know, that's. Yeah, there's a big one. We can get into that another time. But I think because we've had so much death and Darkness.
- [54:16]
Maddie
Maybe.
- [54:16]
Kat Byers
Maybe it's best to end on one. That I think is one of the, I guess, lighter tales from the morgue, which is a case from, I think it was 1901. And. And there was a feature in the newspaper. There was a patrolman walking around midtown, it was middle of winter, and he came across some boys sort of looking at something in a gutter. And he asked them what they were doing, and they'd found a baby. And so I know this doesn't start like a great beginning of a lighter story.
- [54:43]
Maddie
It's not very promising.
- [54:44]
Kat Byers
Bear with me. And so he looked at and wrapped in a blanket and he, you know, obviously it was cold and he thought, oh, gosh, the. The child's frozen. So he took the baby to the morgue and it was placed. At this point, there was sort of refrigeration and everything. And so it was placed, you know, in the, I guess the storage space, refrigeration space until an autopsy could be done. And then a few days later, at the end of his shift, the sort of. The doctor in charge of doing the autopsies brought the baby out and unwrapped it and discovered that it was made of candy. What, so this was just a candy baby? We don't really have any more details than that.
- [55:25]
Maddie
A life size.
- [55:25]
Kat Byers
A life size candy baby. What?
- [55:28]
Maddie
And apparently when you say candy cat just for British. Any Brits listening, what do you mean by candy? Do you mean a chocolate baby or do you mean made of sugar?
- [55:42]
Kat Byers
I'm guessing sugar. We don't have many details. I'm actually imagining a jelly baby, but larger is kind of how I pictured it. And maybe more like life coloreds. Yeah. Who knows how this ended up happening. And apparently in the register it just says, like, unidentified candy baby. So I imagine that the policeman got quite a lot of.
- [56:05]
Maddie
You'd never live that down.
- [56:06]
Kat Byers
Yeah, you would not live that down. But there were cases of. This was one of our paper skeleton ones. And sometimes it was people kind of playing jokes on the morgue and other times, yeah, it was actual mistaken stuff because you'd also have mistaken identity sometimes by accident, sometimes people trying to commit bigamy. So, you know, there was a lot. Insurance fraud also obviously came up with that too. But yeah, the candy baby was a story with, I suppose you want to say, a happy ending in the morgue. Who made it? How did it end up there?
- [56:33]
Maddie
The most pressing question, I want to know, did anyone eat it?
- [56:36]
Kat Byers
You know what, I don't know. I just also don't know if you would want to at that point. I'm not sure how fresh it would be.
- [56:43]
Anthony
I love a jelly. Like, love a jelly. Not jelly babies. Actually. I really don't like jelly babies at all. Jelly sweets. I do. And I, even I, in my desperation, wouldn't eat that. I don't think that's. That's probably not something. But do you know what I love about that? And this is what I love about history generally. Somebody somewhere in the city of New York knew exactly who made that candy baby, knew exactly why they made it, and they have gone to their grave with them and maybe one or two other members of their friends or family circle knowing all the details about that. And we are left with this ridiculously tantalizing tale. And sometimes it's better for us not to know. Sometimes it's just more human for us not to know. So I love that we can't piece everything together in that case.
- [57:28]
Kat Byers
I think that also happens a lot with the morgue, especially with the stuff that I only get from news sources where I'm like, what? Like, what are you talking about? There was another story about this couple that fell out over pasta. Again, why these details were in the newspaper, like the way she cooked macaroni and she stormed out and then he went to the morgue and he like, looking for her and they misidentified someone as her. But then there's this weird bit in the newspaper report about this, like, odd exchange between him and the morgue keeper that sounds like fake poetry. Anyway, and then she comes home a couple days later and he's like, I thought you were dead. And she's like, no, I'm not. And then she's also like, where's my wedding dress? And he's like, I buried you in it. And she's like, what? What have you done? And then, yeah, that in itself is just a whole other tabloid story.
- [58:12]
Maddie
And it turns out he'd buried a human made of macaroni.
- [58:15]
Kat Byers
One can only hope the second installment if someone turns into I love macaroni too. Yeah, weird stories.
- [58:21]
Maddie
Well, Kat, we will get you. We'll have to get you back to tell the story of the people with the duck. We need to know that one. But thank you so much for coming on After Dark today and thank you at home for listening. If you want to leave us a five star review, you can do that wherever you get your podcasts and you can even email us at after after dark@historyhit.com tell us what you think of the show and suggest future episodes. We absolutely love to hear from you. That's after dark. Historyhit.com See you next time.
- [58:57]
Kat Byers
So good, so good, so good. Perfect gifts. We've got them at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Ugg, Nike, Barefoot Dreams, Kate Spade, New York and more. Finds everything on their wish list all in one place.
- [59:10]
Anthony
Steve Madden.
- [59:12]
Kat Byers
Yes, please.
- [59:12]
Maddie
It's perfect.
- [59:14]
Kat Byers
Did we just score the greatest gifts of all time?
- [59:17]
Maddie
Yeah.
- [59:18]
Kat Byers
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