Skip to content

Kristen Martin

Kristen Martin is the author of The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood. 

A barbed-wire oval frames a victim of the NY Department of Corrections. Carrying a shovel on his shoulder, he walks across the grass toward a dead tree. A ghost watches him from a crumbling building.

Abolishing the Prison of the Dead

To get to Hart Island, a hundred-acre sliver of land in the Long Island Sound, you must first make your way to City Island, a slightly larger sliver of land off the coast of the Bronx. City Island is a small community that feels more Long Island than Bronx. Its streets are lined ...