PATRICK ANDRIANI had been looking for the remains of his grandfather, Leonardo, for about 20 years when the court documents came in the mail. The cover page read:
NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE AUTHORITY, a public body corporate and politic.
Plaintiff,
v.
ANY LIVING, LINEAL DESCENDANTS, et al.,
Defendants.
“We didn’t really understand what it was,” says Andriani, a marketing executive from Roxbury, as he sits at his kitchen table, the thick stack of paper in his hands. “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.
A decade 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" because of its reputation as a place that college kids would climb to drink beer and paint graffiti on its face. But it's probably still better known by its old name: Snake Hill.
Today, Laurel Hill is home to a well-manicured county park, with ball fields, a boat ramp into the Hackensack and the prehistoric-themed attraction Field Station: Dinosaurs, where animatronic dinosaurs stalk among the reeds.
But Snake Hill has a history. At times, it's been home to a poor farm, an almshouse, a tuberculosis hospital, an insane asylum and a penitentiary. More recently, a juvenile detention center sat at its base. It was also home to the Hudson County Burial Grounds, where the dead from those facilities and surrounding towns were buried, sometimes one atop the other.
It's where Leonardo Andriani came to rest.
LEONARDO ANDRIANI was born in Italy in 1896. He served in the Italian navy during World War I and, struggling to find work, left his family to come to America to earn a living.
A family photo of Leonardo Andriani, who was buried at the Hudson County Burial Grounds for decades before his remains were unearthed during a construction project on the New Jersey Turnpike.
"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 only met his father when Leonardo made two return trips to his European home. The last time, in 1948, Leonardo told his son he was headed back to the United States and would send for him once he got 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 family story is that Leonardo was found wandering the streets of Hoboken, disoriented. He was taken to the mental hospital on Snake Hill, then called the lunatic asylum, on Dec. 21, 1948. He died on Christmas Eve.
Patrick Andriani says the stigma of mental illness made his grandfather’s death at the asylum a sensitive subject in the family. Still, he wanted to know what happened. He knew Leonardo ended up at a place called the Hudson County Burial Grounds, but he never got a straight answer on where, exactly, that was. He visited county offices and wrote letters to four governors as he and his father took up the quest off and on 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 trail.
WHEN HUDSON COUNTY broke off from Bergen County in 1840, it got Snake Hill in the split and wore it like an albatross.
"The only thing here at the time was the poor farm," says Dan McDonough, Secaucus' town historian, who has researched Snake Hill's history 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 complex of dozens of buildings across more than 200 acres.
Historic maps show at least three cemeteries. As many as 9,781 people were laid to rest there between 1880 and 1962, according to a burial ledger unearthed during the legal 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 records of the dead weren’t kept, but things in Hudson County have a habit of disappearing when a need arises. At least 434 bodies were disinterred during the 20th century, according to McDonough’s research, including 78 that were relocated during the original construction of the Turnpike in the 1950s.
In the 1970s, John Marinan, the morgue custodian at nearby Meadowview Hospital, was indicted along with several associates in a scheme to pocket the proceeds of a $40,000 contract to relocate the dead at Snake Hill, allegedly using inmates and Hudson County road crews to do the work instead of hiring legitimate contractors.
He died while awaiting sentencing for a conviction in another burial scheme, and the Snake Hill case fell apart, according to The Jersey Journal. It's now believed the workers simply removed the grave markers — among them No. 6,408 — Leonardo Andriani's grave — and left the bodies where they lay.
WHEN THE TURNPIKE AUTHORITY discovered the bodies years later, it was required by law to remove them and put them elsewhere, a process known as disinterment and reinterment. It was also required to make an effort to find the dead's next of kin. Because Patrick Andriani and his father had been so thorough in their quest, the Andrianis were the first family the authority turned up.
They became the "living, lineal descendants, et al." The defendants.
When they appeared in court and learned the agency planned to place the bodies in a mass grave, the Andrianis were horrified. The chancery judge, Thomas Olivieri, sided with them.
"What still strikes me, even after 10 years, is how these graves ended up with no indication whatsoever that there were people buried under the ground," 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 bodies be catalogued and identified to the extent it was possible.
The Louis Berger Group, a cultural resource management firm, was hired for the project, still considered among the largest of its kind ever performed. Gerry Scharfenberger, a professor of archaeology at Monmouth University, was one of the principal investigators.
A memorial at Laurel Hill County Park pays tribute to the dead excavated from Snake Hill during a construction project on the New Jersey Turnpike in 2003.
“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 were between 600 and 900 graves in the interchange's path. By the time they were finished excavating the "area of potential effect" — the chunk of meadow where the interchange would sit — they removed 4,571 bodies and more than 100,000 artifacts.
"We were able to identify a little over 900 of them, which is remarkable given that there was no way to identify them from the surface," Scharfenberger says.
For one body, though, they had some clues: Leonardo Andriani was 6-foot-2, with a gold tooth and a limp in his gait. The archaeologists found a body that fit the description and matched its prominent jaw with a family photo. They brought Patrick Andriani to the site for a belated introduction.
"It was a weird, otherworldly, surreal experience," 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 right next to the Turnpike, and Olivieri, concerned about the structural integrity of the highway and the safety of the archaeologists, ruled in July 2003 that they would not dig beneath its embankments.
The Andrianis and a handful of other families who came forward to claim relatives had them reburied at private ceremonies. The remainder of the 4,571 were reinterred at Maple Grove Park Cemetery in Hackensack, where the names of the dead span several stone slabs of a memorial. Aside from them and the roughly 430 removed a century earlier, the rest of those 9,781 remain unaccounted.
These days, construction is subject to regulations requiring assessments of disturbed land, but the Meadowlands is a very different place from the cedar swamps of the 19th century. Beyond the park, beyond the Turnpike, it remains a wild place — with a high water table and a reputation for swallowing secrets.
Scharfenberger, the archaeologist, wouldn't speculate.
"We're pretty confident that we got everything out of the footprint of what was going to be disturbed by the construction," he says. "We couldn't go outside that footprint, so you really can't tell what else is out there."