NEW YORK MAGAZINE: A Park to Remember a Plague

Written By Peter Freeby

By Justin Davidson

In April 2010, an urban planner named Paul Kelterborn read an article in this magazine about the doomed St. Vincent’s Hospital, where so many AIDS patients died in the early years of the epidemic. Since there was no major AIDS memorial in a city that had lost more than 100,000 people, wrote David France, “the bland sarcophagus along Seventh Avenue holds that place.”

Kelterborn and his friend Christopher Tepper felt that the exquisitely appropriate place for a memorial would be the neglected little triangle next to St. Vincent’s, bounded by Seventh Avenue, Greenwich Avenue, and West 12th Street. In the kind of urban activism that gave us the High Line, they formed a group, raised money, pleaded with bureaucrats, and held a design competition. Nearly 500 entries flooded in.

Peter Freeby

I design and build books, periodicals, brand materials, websites and marketing for a range of artists, non profits and educational programs including Elizabeth Murray, Jack Tworkov, Edith Schloss, Janice Biala, Joan Witek, George McNeil, Judy Dolnick, Jordan Eagles, John Silvis, Diane Von Furstenberg, The Generations Project, The Koch Institute, The McCandlish Phillips Journalism Institute and the Dow Jones News Fund.

https://peterfreeby.com
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