Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
ADVOCACY A presentation by the Queer History Alliance to Community Board 2 on creating an AIDS memorial park in Greenwich Village. The village was especially hard hit by the AIDS epidemic.
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.
Now, with the hospital’s new owners, Rudin Management, planning seven residential towers and five town houses for the St. Vincent’s footprint, the park’s destiny may be up for grabs. The expectation had been that Rudin, in consultation with Community Board 2, would spend up to $10 million to turn the 15,000-square-foot triangle bordered by Seventh Avenue, Greenwich Avenue and West 12th Street into a privately owned public space, much like Zuccotti Park farther downtown.
It was a rezoning “giveback” the community was never completely happy with, mainly because Rudin would own the space and retain the oxygen tanks for the use of the emergency care facility that is replacing the hospital. But the board felt it had no alternative.
Enter Chris Tepper, 29, and Paul Kelterborn, 33, friends and fledgling urban planners with a poignant idea: Refurbish the triangle as a gemlike neighborhood park and memorial to those who lost their lives to AIDS and to the New Yorkers who cared for them before they died. Pay for it by soliciting state and city money and private donations as well as requesting that Rudin contribute to the construction and endow a maintenance fund.
Under the umbrella of the Queer History Alliance, established last spring, they have insisted that this dilapidated Greenwich Village corner is the obvious location for a memorial park with grand ambitions. After all, many of those stricken were Village residents, and early on, St. Vincent’s became the epicenter of the epidemic that raged through the city.
Mr. Tepper, a deputy director of development at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Mr. Kelterborn, a project manager at the Municipal Art Society, are mobilizing a coalition of supporters — last weekend they hosted a fund-raising barbecue in Williamsburg called “Sausage. Beer. Advocacy” — to turn a mundane plot in an emotionally resonant location into what they say will be a transcendent and historic place. Yes, there is already an AIDS memorial in Hudson River Park, but the Queer History Alliance argues that the city can and should do better. “This is one of the sweetest corners in the Village, or at least it could be, and this is probably the last chance anybody will have to design a public piazza in New York City,” Mr. Tepper said. “This opportunity is not going to come back in 20 years; it’s do it now or it will never get done.”
The plans of Mr. Tepper and Mr. Kelterborn are detailed in a 22-page PowerPoint presentation that had its debut at the Oct. 5 meeting of Community Board 2’s parks committee before a standing-room-only crowd in a classroom at the Little Red Schoolhouse.
It was mostly Mr. Tepper who lectured on the superiority of the Queer History Alliance’s memorial park to the proposed redesign of the park presented the same evening by Rudin Management, which bought the St. Vincent’s campus for roughly $260 million.
Rudin’s conceptual plans for the park had varying amounts of greenery and brown circles to demarcate “features” like a fountain or a play area. The oxygen tanks continued to stand sentry at the park’s west corner.
In Mr. Tepper and Mr. Kelterborn’s scheme, the tanks, loading dock and driveways were eliminated and the entire triangle was devoted to parkland.
Where there now sits a dreary tangle of rat-infested ivy and half-dead trees, the Queer History Alliance envisions a sylvan masterpiece at street level, with the shape of the totemic AIDS ribbon integrated into the landscaping. In an existing underground space, an education facility/museum about the history of the epidemic, and the pivotal role played by St. Vincent’s and the community, would be installed.
The ultimate design would be selected through a juried competition and ownership of the park would be given to the city.
The alliance has grown from the grass-roots vision of Mr. Tepper and Mr. Kelterborn to an advocacy group with an e-mail list of 300 supporters and an advisory board that includes Robert Hammond, co-founder of the High Line; Philip E. Aarons, co-founder of the developer Millennium Partners; and Richard Burns, for 22 years the executive director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, a block from St. Vincent’s.
The Center is acting as the alliance’s fiscal sponsor as it pursues not-for-profit status. Mr. Hammond is the group’s de facto rabbi and role model.
“I thought they had a good concept, but that’s the easiest part, and I bombarded them with all the problems they would have to overcome to get a project like this done,” Mr. Hammond said of the intricacies of navigating the city stakeholders involved in the approval process. “As someone who walks by that site often, I personally have thought, ‘What a waste.’ But this idea could be big enough to get through all the challenges that might bring it down.
“The other challenge is making something both a public space and a memorial. In the end, it has to be the kind of project where everyone wins.”
High-profile neighborhood residents like the actor, writer and director John Cameron Mitchell, who after nearly 20 years there refers to himself as “the official Village crank,” are embracing the proposal.
“It’s a no-brainer to put it here,” Mr. Mitchell said. “I walk out of my apartment and St. Vincent’s is standing there like a ghost ship. That was the ground zero of AIDS in New York, a conservative institution that quickly adapted to its unconventional patients and made heroic efforts to try and save them.”
Not everyone in the neighborhood agrees with the alliance’s vision, at least not yet.
In an Oct. 4 letter to the board, the Greenwich Village Block Associations stipulated that while they were not opposed to the concept of some commemoration of the AIDS epidemic, “we oppose any design that would make the park, itself, an AIDS Memorial that would attract additional visitors to an already over-visited community.”
AT a tour of the Triangle an hour before the Oct. 5 meeting, Lisa Whiting, a community resident toting her tiny white dog, Mia, said she “was not keen on the AIDS memorial because it might take away from the sense of a real park.”
Another neighborhood resident, Frederica Sigel, was cautiously optimistic. “I think we only have one shot to get this right,” she said, “and yes, there are some inhibitors on the site as it now stands and we have to make sure Rudin does something right about that. But a well-designed park that attracts people will maintain itself, as opposed to a poorly designed one. And I think the idea of an AIDS memorial is a lovely idea that just has to be done right. It’s a more sensible idea than others I can think of.”
Brad Hoylman, the chairman of Community Board 2, said of the park, “People who live in the neighborhood seem to have something very different in mind.” Among the requests he has heard are that it include a full playground, or a memorial for 9/11 responders who were treated at St. Vincent’s.
And though some residents complained that the initial Rudin plan felt like a corporate plaza — no wrought-iron fence, no bubbling fountain, no character — Mr. Hoylman said others worried about the delay of a lengthy design competition.
“It’s the age-old question: What does the community really want?” he said. “For some, an AIDS memorial is not a priority. It’s become kind of a hot potato: Do we want a memorial park or a park with a memorial in it?”
That question has yet to be answered.
As part of the seven-month Uniform Land Use Review Process of planning and approvals, the community board will hold hearings into November. The board and Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, will pass advisory recommendations along to the City Planning Commission, which has 60 days to review the design proposals before sending its recommendation to the City Council for a vote.
“You want to encourage people who have bold ideas and give them an opportunity to present them,” Mr. Stringer said in a telephone interview. “I see this memorial as part of our toolbox of things that can happen there.”
Earlier last week, the Queer History Alliance and officials of Community Board 2 began to discuss a possible “co-branding” of the park plan, Mr. Tepper and Mr. Hoylman said.
John Gilbert, Rudin’s chief operating officer, said the developer would take no official stance on the memorial. “We don’t have the power to bless or not bless this project,” he said. “Our goal was obviously to create a world-class open space.” Eric Rudin, president and vice chairman of his family’s firm, said: “We don’t want to specifically endorse or oppose anything at this time. We would like to make the community happy. Everything is possible, I guess.”
But that might not be the case.
As part of its redevelopment of the St. Vincent’s site, Rudin Management has asked for zoning variances that require it to provide a certain amount of open space, which needs to be approved within the strict seven-month land-use review period. Moreover, city rules require that park space be provided at the same time a development is occupied. Rudin expects to finish construction by 2014, but it is unclear whether the alliance’s design competition would have produced a winner by then. Working out those issues to the satisfaction of the planning department, Rudin and the community could prove thorny.
In the meantime, encouraged by the response at the Oct. 5 meeting, Mr. Tepper and Mr. Kelterborn asked George Vellonakis, the parks department architect who supervised the renovation of Washington Square Park, to provide conceptual renderings of a memorial park/education center, pro bono, for the November meeting of the community board’s parks committee.
“I feel like we’re being taken really seriously by the community board, and that the Rudins are taking us very seriously, too,” Mr. Kelterborn said. “They know we’re not just going to go away and that there may be a way if not to collaborate, then to at least make an interesting alliance.”
Marjorie J. Hill, chief executive of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, said the alliance’s proposal gave Community Board 2 an opportunity “to provide the neighborhood with the green space all neighborhoods want and deserve, and also to recognize the valiant contribution of this community and this hospital during the AIDS crisis.”
“The site is very special,” Dr. Hill continued. “Some might even say it’s holy.”
