via Archinect
To mark the opening of the new New York City AIDS Memorial designed by Studio ai, Alexandra Schwartz reflects on the complicated relationship between the epidemic, the gay activist community, and real estate.
"The disease started charting its course through the city just as the bearish real-estate market, coaxed out of hibernation by policies favorable to developers, turned relentlessly bullish," Schwartz writes. "As people died, their same-sex partners, denied the sorts of survivor benefits to which a spouse would be entitled, were evicted from the homes they had shared; newly vacated blocks of affordable apartments were converted into high-end condos and market-rate rentals."
In fact, according to the article, the neighborhoods of Manhattan that had the highest rates of HIV infection later experienced the most rapid gentrification.1
...
In 1969, St. Vincent’s Hospital, whose main building sat across Seventh Avenue, bought the land and demolished the Sheridan. A community garden briefly took its place before the hospital erected its Materials Handling Center, an unlovely squat brown brick structure to house its loading dock, in the nineteen-eighties. By then, St. Vincent’s had become ground zero for New York’s aids crisis, with an aids ward second in size only to San Francisco General’s. Medical supplies were transported into the hospital through tunnels that ran underneath the Handling Center. Corpses were transported out the same way.
St. Vincent’s closed in 2010, and has since been replaced, after much local protest and many heated town-hall discussions, by an apartment building of luxury condos and a row of townhouses developed by the Rudin Management Company. One good thing to come of the substitution of a hospital serving the whole downtown community with homogenous housing for the wealthy is St. Vincent’s Triangle Park, as the pizza slice on Twelfth Street is now known, a freshly landscaped fifteen-thousand-square-foot public space of benches, walkways, lawn, and water jets, which is also home to the nearly completed New York City aids Memorial. Much of the memorial is still fenced off behind blue tarp, but it was briefly unveiled for a dedication ceremony on December 1st, World aids Day, revealing an ethereal, kite-like canopy of silvery slatted-steel triangles anchored to the ground by triangular legs stood on point.
A triangular monument in Triangle Park on a triangular plot of land is more than a pleasing coincidence of geometry. In Nazi concentration camps, gay prisoners were made to identify themselves by wearing a pink triangle. The famous “Silence = Death” poster, designed in 1986 to demand that attention be paid and action taken against aids, claimed that shape and inverted it, drawing a parallel between the two catastrophes while positing the triangle as a symbol of pride and defiance. The memorial’s delicate design, by the Brooklyn firm Studio ai, is reminiscent of a feather, or of a snowflake splintered into its component tetrahedrons, or of a translucent origami crane. There is something almost animate about it, as if it might unpinion itself at any moment and take flight.2
