A Place for the Homeless to Honor Their Dead

At the end of Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel Sister Carrie, the ruined, homeless George Hurstwood commits suicide in a New York City flophouse. "A slow, black boat setting out from the pier at Twenty-seventh Street upon its weekly errand bore, with many others, his nameless body to the Potter's Field,” wrote Dreiser. More than a century later, such anonymous burials in “potters’ fields” for the indigent or unknown are still generally the norm in U.S. cities.

But across the Atlantic, the city of Copenhagen has found a more dignified way of laying its homeless to rest. Two years ago, in response to a request from the advocacy organization Giv Din Hånd—or Give a Hand—the city set aside an 800-square-foot section of Assistens Cemetery for interring “street people.” Assistens, a beautifully landscaped and beloved green space in a central area of the capital, is the final resting place of such Danish luminaries as Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard.