The Trench in Potter's Field

However, due to the large influx of people immigrating to the United States, the tenement plan quickly failed.

Due to the massive amount of poverty suffered by those who were living in tenements, death occurred at a rapid rate.

Those who couldn't afford burial plots were buried in large communal trenches/mass graves on Hart's Island off the Bronx in NYC.

The picture illustrates the depth in which the trenches were created in order to accommodate the body count-nearly three stories deep.

The trenches were a symbol of not only the government and wealthy people's contribution (or lack thereof) to the state New York was in, but the poverty that was suffered by the other half.