Why here?

The memorial sits at the gateway to a public park adjacent to the former St. Vincent’s Hospital, which housed the City’s first and largest AIDS ward, is often considered the symbolic epicenter of the disease, and figures prominently in The Normal Heart, and Angels in America, and other important pieces of literature and art that tell the story of the plague years in New York. The park site is also less than a block from the LGBT Community Center on 13th Street, where ACT-UP and other AIDS advocacy/support groups were first organized. It sits within blocks of the first headquarters of GMHC and the office of a doctor on W. 12th Street that Lambda Legal successfully prevented from being evicted for treating early AIDS patients. Furthermore, the site is highly visible, accessible, and surrounded by amenities for visitors. For all these reasons, New York City officially named the new park that houses the memorial the “New York City AIDS Memorial Park at St. Vincent’s Triangle” which becomes the first significant public space in the City dedicated to the AIDS epidemic.