By Gus Saltonstall
In April of 2017, longtime West Side Rag reporter Joy Bergmann wrote about the passing of a young homeless man who had been found dead underneath the West Side Highway near West 71st Street in Riverside Park.
It was more than a story to Bergmann; she knew the young man, had befriended him, as had many others in a small pocket of the Upper West Side where he had appeared on a bench in Riverside Park near West 75th Street in 2014. Always sitting bolt upright. Always quiet. Always looking straight ahead. He said his name was “Stephen.”
The full story of Stephen can be heard in Episode 1 of a new podcast released on September 28 from Radio Diaries about people buried in the public cemetery on New York City’s Hart Island: “The Unmarked Graveyard.” The podcast was featured at the Tribeca Film Festival, contains multiple interviews from Upper West Siders, including Bergmann, and was played on NPR’s “All Things Considered” on Monday, October 9th.
“It was always kind of reassuring to see him because he was such a big guy and so gentle in his presence, he was a constant presence in the park, but a mysterious one,” Bergmann says on the podcast .
Billy Healey, a bird watcher and a Riverside Park regular, struck up his own relationship with the quiet man. “It was like pulling teeth to get him to say anything,” he says. Healey would bring Stephen leftovers from family meals and eventually gave him a burgundy hoodie.
It was the hoodie that Stephen was wearing when his body was discovered on March 9, 2017.
“After he died, people put flowers on the bench where Stephen would sit, they put signs up and cards. When you live in a big city, there’s the anonymity of the big city that we all sort of treasure, but then there are the constant presences of people whose names you don’t know, but who you see every day,” Bergmann said on the podcast. “These are people who become woven into the fabric of your experience in a neighborhood. And when one of them goes away — there is a loss — there is a loss.”
A Heartboken Mother
Loss had dominated Susan Hurlburt’s life in the years that Stephen sat in Riverside Park. She was his mother, from Inwood, Long Island. Stephen’s legal name was Neil Harris, Jr., Hurlburt said on the podcast. He was 32 years old, loved animals and cooking, and suffered from severe social anxiety, schizophrenia, and periods of paranoia, which had only emerged in his late teens. Hulbert, a single mother, had raised him alone, and hadn’t stopped looking for him since he vanished from a train station in Inwood, on December 12, 2014.
“My hero is my mom because she has always been there for me,” reads an essay Neil wrote in elementary school that Hurlburt kept. “After a while she got a job and we got a home. And that’s why my mom is my hero.”
Neil was hospitalized at 29 and prescribed medication for schizophrenia, which he soon stopped taking. After a short stay with relatives, he asked to be brought to the Inwood train station to sleep. “I felt helpless,” Hurlburt said. She went there to give him money and food, but when she returned , he was gone. She never saw him alive again.
Following Bergman’s West Side Rag article in 2017, “A Young Homeless Man’s Death In Riverside Park Leaves A Void; ‘I Wish I Knew His Name’, there was an outpouring of support from the community that included a memorial plaque on “Stephen’s bench” near West 75th Street and Riverside.
Discovering his Real Identity
Most of the graves on Hart Island are buried with roughly 150 bodies. There are no headstones. It is where New York City lays to rest those that are unclaimed, unidentified, or whose families aren’t able to pay for their own plot. Neil was laid to rest in Plot 383 – Section 1 – Grave 35.
Journalist and West Side Rag contributor Jessica Brockington was another Upper West Side local who had forged a relationship with him. She had gotten to know him over the years while walking her dogs. In August, 2018, more than a year after the man she knew as Stephen had died, she was reviewing a government database when she made a startling discovery — a photograph that looked like Stephen appeared on a Justice Department website concerning missing persons cases, but the associated name was Neil Harris, Jr.!
In the weeks that followed, Brockington confirmed the photo with other Riverside Park goers, reached out to local authorities, and found Neil’s mother’s Facebook page — where Hurlburt had been making weekly posts reading: “Still missing, still praying. I’ll never give up on you.” After some frustrating interactions with detectives, Brockington reached out to the founder of a nonprofit that supports families of missing people, who quickly helped connect her with Susan Hurlburt.
Brockington knew that if she was correct about Stephen and Neil being the same person, she had the excruciating task of telling a mother that she had lost her son. On a phone call, she explained where Riverside Park was and how her dogs would always run to Stephen on the bench. “That’s gotta be Neil,” Hurlburt said thinking about how animals always loved her son. Brockington then sent her the medical examiner’s photo from the autopsy.
“I know my son, and as soon as I saw that picture, I knew that was my son,” Hurlburt said. “I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath.”
A DNA test soon confirmed the identity. Neil had died of an untreated ulcer.
An Upper West Side Remembrance
Pastors at the Christian Community church at West 74th Street had also known “Stephen.” Shortly after his identity was confirmed as Neil, the church decided to hold a service for him.
Hulbert and her family came. Friends from his childhood came. And a collection of people from the neighborhood came.
“I walked in and looked at all these people, and I told my sister, ‘I don’t know these people, Neil didn’t know these people.’ She looked at me and said, ‘Obviously he did. Listen to what they’re saying.’”
After different Upper West Siders took their turns speaking, Hulbert made her way to the front of the church.
“You’re all angels, you watched over my son, you took care of him, and that’s all I ever prayed for over the four years,” she said.
You can listen to the full “Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island,” HERE. You can also find it on Spotify, Apple Music, or anywhere else you listen to your podcasts. And don’t miss Episode 1 HERE. It is 26 minutes well spent.
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Such a sad story. He was a human person like the rest of us.
I think this from the article is telling:
“Neil was hospitalized at 29 and prescribed medication for schizophrenia, which he soon stopped taking. After a short stay with relatives, he asked to be brought to the Inwood train station to sleep.”
I don’t know enough about Stephen’s history to know whether residential treatment would have helped him back in the days before the system of state mental hospitals was largely replaced by treatment “in the community.” I think many of the WSR’s readers will think that the 1963 legislation has brought many ill effects, which continue to go unaddressed. And the police are not to be expected to be the primary responders to crises of mentally ill people living on the street.
This article tries to grapple with some of the issues today under the Adams mayoralty:
https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/ghosts-of-deinstitutionalization
Progressives don’t want to hear about forced institutionalization as a potential solution to this mental health crisis. Apparently it strips people suffering from severe mental illness. of their human rights. Somehow it’s more compassionate and humane to let them die in a public park.
I think the situation is more complicated than that. And labelling it as a political issue (blaming “progressives”) doesn’t help to solve the problem, only to turn it into finger pointing.
It’s a fine line, and it has nothing to do with “progressives.” It has to do with the abuses of forced institutionalization. But I agree that more needs to be done to convince people it is to their great advantage to be in a hospital. However, reducing the number of hospitals had to do with money, not civil liberties. It’s always about money.
I agree that it is mostly money. What hospital is going to keep mentally ill now, even if they agree? No insurance will cover it especially Medicaid.
However a political part is also important. Even if insurances start paying for long term hospital stays (which they wouldn’t ), there will be a million of class actions decrying cruelty and human rights violations.
In addition, there will be a huge resistance from shelter operators who make millions on housing people with mental illness and claim to provide “services” that have neither standards nor measurable outcome. These services cost them nothing because in reality they don’t do anything. Real medical help is expensive and therefore is not offered.
Absolutely. One of the most difficult issues is that the medication to treat mental illness also often comes with unpleasant side effects, and so people stop taking it, and there are great complexities in convincing a mentally ill person that he/she is mentally ill in the first place. Since that person has no rational thought process, and schizophrenia makes it difficult for the person to communicate. there are problems all around. People need medication, therapy animals, and places of employment that can deal with mentally handicapped, and that is all a tall order for a narcissistic, money driven society. There are also many various causes for the many different mental conditions — some may be self induced and more treatable with therapy, and others are hardwiring, neurological brain conditions that need medication. It’s a very complex world.
I have a dear friend who developed schizophrenia in his late 20’s. He’s the son of Indian immigrants (he moved to the US when he was still in grade school.) It’s been over ten years now, and he moved back in with his parents and struggles to maintain basic jobs. He was a charismatic, smart, handsome guy who was great with languages (I thought he’d be working at the UN now.) Between cultural and systemic issues, he’s completely untreated. I know his family loves him very much, but it’s a very complicated situation. I feel so much for Neil’s mom.
There is no easy answer to this very sad problem but the answer shouldn’t be hospital versus the streets.
The first thing these people need is a home — not a shelter where they are in one of a dozen beds in a room and forced to live within tight restrictions and curfews — and forced into the street during the day. Nor should the answer be forced hospitalization with the likelihood of rampant abuse.
If there’s decent housing supplied with all the money we pay in taxes, that would be a start. And why do we only have one choice lottery for education? Why not have a lottery that would fund housing for the homeless?
There are solutions but forced hospitalization versus a slab of concrete in the street is not one of them.
G-d bless Stephen and his mother. What heartbreak.
I remember Stephen/Neil well and was surprised by how saddened I was by his passing. I remember he did his best to avoid eye contact with me, but seemed to enjoy my dog’s presence (& my dog in turn seemed to enjoy gravitating towards him). I still think of him sometimes, 6 years later. Thanks for making his story known.
The work that WSR did to connect Stephen/Neil with his family–sadly, after his death–was a genuine mitzvah and I will always remember it warmly.
Each of us are all some mother’s worry and care. Am happy Susan Hurlburt finally has answers to many questions about her son and some measure of closure.
It restores a measure of one’s faith in humanity that people who were strangers in a way to “Stephen” tried their best to help him while he lived, and did not give up on him after death.
Great story…certainly gives you hope for the humanity of others. I’m glad that there was closure for his Mom and appreciative to all who befriended a lost soul.
What happened to Stephen’s bench on Riverside. I used to stop by, and I no longer see the plaque. Was it taken down?
That would be terrible if the memorial plaque was removed. Does anyone know?
It isn’t always about money, funding, corruption within mental health system, etc…
Mental disease paranoia schizophrenia is just that; sometimes even the most well off families and or persons with best intentions cannot prevent someone suffering from said illness from wanting to be away or outdoors.
A while ago Sunday NYT magazine had an excellent piece on one physician in Boston and his work (along with dedication to) the homeless.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/05/magazine/boston-homeless-dr-jim-oconnell.html#:~:text=since%20the%201980s.-,Dr.,Care%20for%20the%20Homeless%20Program.
Basically one take away from piece is that you have to “learn to listen”. Homeless including those suffering from mental illness often can be difficult to reach. It takes time and patience to build a level of trust.
NYC now has an easier process for family and friends of those buried on Hart Island to visit graves to pay respects. Disinterment of remains for reburial elsewhere is now often possible under certain circumstances. Wonder if Susan Hurlburt is considering latter. That would be a worthy GFM or something.
Encourage all to listen to the full podcast episode about Neil. Very moving audio documentary. In it, Neil’s mother says she’s at peace with Neil being buried on Hart Island. Neil’s father is buried there as well.