NEW YORK TIMES: A Park, a Memorial, a Debate

by Robin Finn

An October rain was pelting down on the overgrown and under-loved slice of the Village formally known as St. Vincent’s Triangle Park. At its apex, an ugly three-story brick building still shielded the gargantuan oxygen tanks that once pumped life into the bitterly missed St. Vincent’s Hospital, which succumbed to bankruptcy in 2010. From the squat structure’s double driveway and loading dock, patients who did not leave the hospital alive were removed to their final resting places.

St. Vincent’s, which recorded one of the earliest AIDS cases, in 1981, was the home of the first, and most famous, AIDS wing in the Northeast. Tens of thousands of its patients were among the 100,000 New Yorkers who died from 1981 to 1996, the peak of the AIDS epidemic; while sick, many of them could see the park from their hospital rooms.