Editor’s be aware: A model of this story initially ran in 2014 — however the thriller stays.
Patrick Andriani had been searching for the stays of his grandfather, Leonardo, for about 20 years when the courtroom paperwork got here within the mail.
The cowl web page learn:
NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE AUTHORITY, a public physique company and politic.
Plaintiff,
v.
ANY LIVING, LINEAL DESCENDANTS, et al.,
Defendants.
“We didn’t really understand what it was,” says Andriani, a advertising and marketing govt from New Jersey now residing in Arizona, as he flips by means of the thick stack of paper years later. “But as we started to read through it, I said, ‘Oh, I think this has to do with my grandfather.’ “
That was 2002. The Turnpike Authority was looking to build a new interchange in Secaucus — Exit 15X — to give motorists access to the Secaucus Junction train station. As the site was prepared for the work, human remains were discovered.
What followed would end up being one of the largest disinterments of bodies in U.S. history. Thousands of remains were extracted from the Meadowlands during a 10-month period in 2003. All told, more than 4,000 people were reburied in Hackensack and memorialized at a ceremony in late October 2004.
Two decades later, a question lingers: Are there more bodies, forgotten and without families, buried just beyond the New Jersey Turnpike’s shoulder?
LAUREL HILL juts out of a swamp, dark and craggy, between the Hackensack River and the Turnpike. The igneous rock outcropping likely came from the same geologic event that created the Palisades to its east. In the low-lying basin of the Meadowlands, it’s the tallest structure that’s not a capped landfill or a radio tower. It’s also been called “Fraternity Rock” due to its status as a place that faculty youngsters would climb to drink beer and paint graffiti on its face.
But it’s in all probability nonetheless higher recognized by its old title: Snake Hill.
Today, Laurel Hill is home to a well-manicured county park, with ball fields, a ship ramp and idyllic views of the Meadowlands.
But Snake Hill has a historical past. At instances, it’s been home to a poor farm, an almshouse, a tuberculosis hospital, an insane asylum and a penitentiary. More not too long ago, a juvenile detention middle sat at its base.
It was additionally home to the Hudson County Burial Grounds, the place the lifeless from these amenities and surrounding cities had been buried, generally one atop the opposite.
It’s the place Leonardo Andriani got here to relaxation.
LEONARDO ANDRIANI was born in Italy in 1896. He served within the Italian navy throughout World War I and, struggling to seek out work, left his household to return to America to earn a residing.
“He lived his whole life by himself,” his grandson says. “His family was back in Italy. He was a longshoreman in Hoboken — you can imagine what that was like.”
Patrick Andriani’s late father, Gennaro, was raised in Italy and solely met his father when Leonardo made two return journeys to his European home. The final time, in 1948, Leonardo informed his son he was headed again to the United States and would ship for him as soon as he acquired settled.
“He gets back and we don’t know what happened to him,” Patrick Andriani says. “He gets sick. The death certificate says he had a heart attack.”
The household story is that Leonardo was discovered wandering the streets of Hoboken, disoriented. He was taken to the psychological hospital on Snake Hill, then known as the lunatic asylum, on Dec. 21, 1948. He died on Christmas Eve.
Patrick Andriani says the stigma of psychological sickness made his grandfather’s dying on the asylum a delicate topic within the household. Still, he wished to know what occurred. He knew Leonardo ended up at a place known as the Hudson County Burial Grounds, however he by no means acquired a straight reply on the place, precisely, that was. He visited county places of work and wrote letters to 4 governors as he and his father took up the hunt on and off over the years.
“Every administration, I’d reach out to them, and every time, I’d get a different answer,” he says. “One time, they’d say, ‘It doesn’t exist.’ Another time, they’d say, ‘You have to get an attorney.’ That went on for a long time.”
But Patrick Andriani had created a heck of a paper path.
WHEN HUDSON COUNTY broke off from Bergen County in 1840, it acquired Snake Hill within the cut up and wore it like an albatross.
“The only thing here at the time was the poor farm,” says Dan McDonough, Secaucus’ city historian, who has researched Snake Hill’s historical past extensively. “Hudson County decided it needed to expand. It wanted to turn this liability into an asset. So they built a nicer almshouse, and then they built a penitentiary, and then they built a tuberculosis hospital, a smallpox hospital, a contagious disease hospital.”At its peak, Snake Hill was home to a posh of dozens of buildings throughout greater than 200 acres.
Historic maps present at the least three cemeteries. As many as 9,781 folks had been laid to relaxation there between 1880 and 1962, in line with a burial ledger unearthed in the course of the authorized proceedings.
“Anybody could die out here,” McDonough says. “You could have been the most wealthy person in the area, and you got brought out here with some disease or something, and you got buried here.”
It’s not as if data of the lifeless weren’t saved, however issues in Hudson County have a behavior of disappearing when a necessity arises. At least 434 our bodies had been disinterred in the course of the twentieth century, in line with McDonough’s analysis, together with 78 that had been relocated in the course of the authentic development of the Turnpike within the Nineteen Fifties.
In the Seventies, John Marinan, the morgue custodian at close by Meadowview Hospital, was indicted together with a number of associates in a scheme to pocket the proceeds of a $40,000 contract to relocate the lifeless at Snake Hill, allegedly utilizing inmates and Hudson County street crews to do the work as a substitute of hiring authentic contractors.
He died whereas awaiting sentencing for a conviction in one other burial scheme, and the Snake Hill case fell aside, in line with The Jersey Journal. It’s now believed the employees merely eliminated the grave markers — amongst them No. 6,408 — Leonardo Andriani’s grave — and left the our bodies the place they lay.
WHEN THE TURNPIKE AUTHORITY found the our bodies years later, it was required by regulation to take away them and put them elsewhere, a course of often known as disinterment and reinterment. It was additionally required to make an effort to seek out the lifeless’s subsequent of kin.
Because Patrick Andriani and his father had been so thorough of their quest, the Andrianis had been the primary household the authority turned up.
They turned the “living, lineal descendants, et al.” The defendants.
When they appeared in courtroom and realized the company deliberate to place the our bodies in a mass grave, the Andrianis had been horrified. The chancery choose, Thomas Olivieri, sided with them.
”What nonetheless strikes me, even after 10 years, is how these graves ended up with no indication in any respect that there have been folks buried underneath the bottom,” Olivieri says. “If you were to walk along the side of the road and see the grass and debris, you just wouldn’t know there were people under there.”
He ordered the our bodies be catalogued and recognized to the extent it was potential.
The Louis Berger Group, a cultural useful resource administration agency, was employed for the undertaking, nonetheless thought of among the many largest of its sort ever carried out. Gerry Scharfenberger, a professor of archaeology at Monmouth University, was one of many principal investigators.
“It was almost like a Hollywood story, the way it all unfolded,” he says. “It was a real detective story.”
The Turnpike Authority initially estimated there have been between 600 and 900 graves within the interchange’s path. By the time they had been completed excavating the “area of potential effect” — the chunk of meadow the place the interchange would sit — they eliminated 4,571 our bodies and greater than 100,000 artifacts.
”We had been in a position to determine slightly over 900 of them, which is exceptional on condition that there was no technique to determine them from the floor,” Scharfenberger says.
For one physique, although, that they had some clues: Leonardo Andriani was 6-foot-2, with a gold tooth and a limp in his gait. The archaeologists discovered a physique that match the outline and matched its outstanding jaw with a household photograph.
They introduced Patrick Andriani to the positioning for a belated introduction.”It was a bizarre, otherworldly, surreal expertise,” Andriani says.
“Because they bring me in and there’s this medical table, and they just have all his remains laid out. It sounds morbid, but I finally got to see him.”
THE EXCAVATION turned up graves proper subsequent to the Turnpike, and Olivieri, involved in regards to the structural integrity of the freeway and the security of the archaeologists, dominated in July 2003 that they might not dig beneath its embankments.
The Andrianis and a handful of different households who got here ahead to say kinfolk had them reburied at personal ceremonies. The the rest of the 4,571 had been reinterred at Maple Grove Park Cemetery in Hackensack, the place the names of the lifeless span a number of stone slabs of a memorial.
Aside from them and the roughly 430 eliminated a century earlier, the remainder of these 9,781 stay unaccounted.
These days, development is topic to laws requiring assessments of disturbed land, however the Meadowlands is a really completely different place from the cedar swamps of the nineteenth century. Beyond the park, past the Turnpike, it stays a wild place — with a excessive water desk and a status for swallowing secrets and techniques.
Scharfenberger, the archaeologist, wouldn’t speculate.
”We’re fairly assured that we acquired every part out of the footprint of what was going to be disturbed by the development,” he says. “We couldn’t go outside that footprint, so you really can’t tell what else is out there.”
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S.P. Sullivan could also be reached at [email protected].
