Design Selected for Proposed AIDS Memorial Park

Almost thirty years ago, the old St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City was an epicenter of death. The hospital was the first in the city to care for HIV/AIDS cases—back when that meant mostly alleviating pain and providing some modicum of comfort—and patients lay in beds in rooms and even hallways. In an adjacent lot, the LGBT Community Services Center served as a similar locus, this one for creation: ACT UP got its start in the old school building, a community organization born out of grief and fury.

Now, the hospital building is scheduled for conversion and redesign, following a high-profile bankruptcy. The new owners of the site are planning to build high-end condos where the building stands now, but are required by law to provide a green public space on the property. This space may hold the city’s first memorial to HIV/AIDS, a memorial with a newly confirmed design albeit without a confirmed location.

“Although New York City has lost more people to AIDS than anywhere else in the country, we still have no significant AIDS memorial to honor and recognize all those lost to the disease or to celebrate the heroic efforts of those who responded, and continue to respond, to the crisis,” the AIDS Memorial Park coalition web site reads.

This week, the coalition chose a design for the proposed park, after receiving nearly 500 entries from around the world.

If the campaign gets its way, the park will be a quiet space set apart from the city, with three mirrored walls replicating a grove of trees into a boundless forest. Street-side, the walls of the park will be covered in slate chalkboards—a changing, living memorial inviting collaboration from visitors.

“AIDS is not a war, nor a disease conquered,” winning Brooklyn firm Studio a+i wrote in its proposal. “There are no definite dates or victims.”

Below the park, in an old basement storage space of St. Vincent’s, an exhibition will present so-far unknown material; the contest space restrictions prohibited the design firm from making those judgments, which are best left to activists, survivors, and the community.

Hopefully, the basement space will be used to educate people that AIDS wasn’t solely a natural disaster, but also one compounded by neglect. It was a disease that took on a remarkable political dimension; as a disease that first killed society’s outcasts, the mainstream social response was tinged with prejudice and callousness. In the margins, those left to fend for themselves formed communities of caretaking, where they together weathered loss and anger and that terrible, fearful unknowing.

If the park is confirmed, the design has a chance to represent all of these themes. It will echo how grief removes mourners from the boundaries of the urban landscape—and how the AIDS epidemic continues, leaving a memorial for past, present, and future victims. 

Shay O'Reilly is a staff writer with Campus Progress. Follow him on Twitter @shaygabriel.

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