THE NEW YORKER: New York’s Necessary New AIDS Memorial

At the intersection of Twelfth Street and Greenwich Avenue, in the West Village, lies a small parcel of land shaped like a pizza slice, with Seventh Avenue as the crust. The Loew’s Sheridan movie theatre opened there in the twenties, anointing the slice as a center of culture in a neighborhood teeming with it. Edward Hopper, a cinephile and a Village local, made a painting of the Sheridan’s glamorous interior in the thirties; Billie Holiday sang there in 1957, two years before she died, selling out its twenty-three hundred seats. 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.