The New York City AIDS Memorial planned for Greenwich Village has emerged sleeker, lighter, more sculptural and a lot less verdant after months of scrutiny by city agencies.

It all began with a question: Why didn’t New York City have a proper memorial to mark the many who had experienced HIV and AIDS in the city over the decades.

Designed by Studio a+i, a Brooklyn-based architecture firm, the memorial will feature an 18-foot steel canopy that will serve as a gateway to the new St. Vincent’s Hospital Park at the intersection of West 12th Street and Greenwich Avenue in the West Village.

“I think it’s a lovely idea,” Scott said. “It had a huge impact on the gay community, on the neighborhood, on the entire city, and it has never been properly commemorated. This would be the perfect place to remember those who were lost.”

New York and the world observed World AIDS Day on Saturday, and for many it was a bittersweet day – one of solemnness and hope.

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.”

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The campaign to create an AIDS memorial park in a triangle site adjacent to the former St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village received a conditional green light from the local community board as it forwarded its recommendation for the parcel of land to the City Planning Commission.

As New York prepares to mark World AIDS Day and remember the more than 100,000 of our fellow city residents who died as a result of HIV infection, Manhattan’s Community Board 2 has taken a responsible step in keeping open the prospects for a commemorative park to honor the battle against the epidemic.

The first article on the proposed New York City AIDS emorial discusses the earliest plans to refurbish the site as neighborhood park and memorial to those who lost their lives to AIDS and to the New Yorkers who cared for them before they died.