New York City AIDS Memorial

More than 100,000 New Yorkers died of AIDS, while caregivers and activists mobilized to care for the ill, fight discrimination, lobby for medical research, and alter the drug approval process, changing the course of the epidemic. In New York City, the earliest documented AIDS cases were first reported in 1981 and disproportionately affected the gay male population in nearby West Village and Chelsea. As St. Vincent’s Hospital filled with ill patients, it established the city’s first AIDS ward and the nation’s second in 1984. Nearby sites were central to organizing and advocacy, including the LGBT Community Center on 13th Street, where ACT-UP and other groups first organized, the first headquarters of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and the former office of Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, whose community-based research trials for AIDS drugs were pioneering and whose co-op board’s attempt to evict him led to the nation’s first AIDS anti-discrimination case in 1983. The triangular site, most recently part of the former St. Vincent’s Hospital campus, was later incorporated into a public park created after the hospital closed in 2010 and transferred to the City of New York in 2017. Many consider this location the symbolic epicenter of the epidemic in New York City and of the mobilization against it. Designed with a white triangular steel sculpture, central fountain, benches, and granite pavement engraved with passages from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” chosen by Jenny Holzer, it is a place for reflection, remembrance, gathering, and resolve in the continuing effort to eradicate the disease.

New York, New York · United States