Landscape Information
Bordered by Greenwich Avenue, West 12th Street, and 7th Avenue, the 0.38-acre, triangular-shaped lot in Manhattan’s West Village was once the site of the Loew’s Sheridan Theatre. Demolished in 1969 by the neighboring St. Vincent’s Hospital for nurses’ residences (unbuilt), it was used in 1984 as a material handling site when the hospital opened a ward for HIV/AIDS patients. After the hospital closed (2010), it was purchased by Rudin Management for use as a public park. Due to its centrality to the AIDS crisis, the AIDS Memorial Park Coalition advocated for a public memorial. Following a 2011 design competition, studio ai architects were selected. Later joined by Rick Parisi of M. Paul Friedberg and Partners, the park opened in 2015, and the memorial one year later. In 2017 the site was donated to the City of New York.
Sited at the northern tip and serving as a gateway to the park, the memorial commemorates the more than 100,000 New Yorkers who died of AIDS and the caregivers and activists who acted on their behalf. The soaring, eighteen-foot-tall canopy of interlocking steel and aluminum triangles shade a low, circular granite fountain. Following its contours is an installation created by conceptual artist Jenny Holzer comprising a spiral of curved-granite pavers engraved with passages from Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself" (1855). Also accessed via an entrance at the southernmost point, the park was constructed with traditional NYC park details—black metal fencing, hexagonal pavers, standard B-pole light fixtures—and its winding walkways are intermittently lined by arcing wooden benches. At the north end is a small plaza animated with in-ground water jets, and, to the south, is an irregularly shaped lawn, partially framed by curving, granite steps. Beds of flowering shrubs and groundcovers with deciduous shade and flowering trees, including honey locust, linden, magnolia, and dogwood, line lawn areas and the park’s perimeter.
