Jimmy was sent to the temporary U.S. Navy prison, or brig, on Hart Island. The 101-acre Hart Island, situated in Long Island Sound a few miles north and east of Manhattan, has a checkered history. At the end of the Civil War, it was briefly a federal prison camp for Confederate soldiers. In 1868, it was purchased by the City of New York for use as a potter’s field, which it still is, with burials there carried out by prisoners from neighboring Rikers Island. At different times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it also housed a tuberculosis hospital, an insane asylum, a boys’ reformatory, a women’s prison, a drug abuse center, a shoe factory, and a Cold War intercontinental missile base.
During World War II, the greater New York City area was a busy navy harbor, teeming with thousands of sailors on shore leave in the city. Disciplinary problems were inevitable, and beginning in April 1943, and until to the end of the war, a portion of Hart Island was requisitioned by the navy as a disciplinary barracks. During its wartime use as a prison camp, the island held about sixty buildings of various kinds, including a mess hall, heating plant, firehouse, butcher, commissary, laundry, garbage disposal plant, hospital, visitors’ house, theater, officers’ quarters, kennels, and two churches. Remnants of many of these buildings stand today as crumbling brick ruins, overgrown with foliage.
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