From the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, Greenwich Village was a mecca for artists, rebels, musicians, and lovers who embraced the counter-culture. Freedom of expression, creative exuberance, and Black and Queer pride pervaded local shops, restaurants, and clubs. The Christopher Street Pier, surrounded by some of the first gay and lesbian bars, became a home for queer people to express their style, sexuality, and love. The Village was also a hub of public art, experimental performance, and activism.

Alongside this bohemian haven, greater New York was experiencing a rise in gentrification and income inequality. As homelessness increased, Mayor Ed Koch cut funding for public services and skyscraper developers moved in to capitalize on the neglect. The culture of The Village began to shift, as metropolitan elite pushed out lower-income residents. John Strausbaugh in “The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues: A History of Greenwich Village,” reports the West Village “had emptied out of gay residents, either because they died or because they moved out of what had become a death zone, that’s when the straight people moved in. It was weird…all these little apartments got bought up and the rich started moving in.”

HIV and AIDs, then mysterious conditions afflicting mostly gay men, added the specter of death. Inadequate research funding, homophobia, and government indifference impeded efforts to understand the disease and treat the sick. Indifference or paranoia permeated the mainstream public as the number of sick and dying began to skyrocket.

With so much at stake, activists fought prejudice and social apathy. Community became more essential. Twelve Step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and NA and MA (for narcotics and marijuana), provided safe spaces and fellowship for people battling addiction.

Some suffered doubly. A bulletin released by the Narcotics Anonymous World Service Board of Trustees said, “The paradox of this disease, like the disease of addiction itself, is the need to belong while already feeling separated. Although we all live with the life-threatening disease of addiction, those of us with HIV and AIDS sometimes have a heightened awareness of living just for today. We may all gain from sharing and being open toward an understanding of new aspects of powerlessness and surrender.”

In New York, a rare bastion of hope for AIDS patients was the famed Greenwich Village Catholic hospital, St. Vincent. Founded by the Sisters of Charity in 1849 to care for the poor, the hospital and its nuns stood on the front lines of the cholera epidemics which devastated the most vulnerable New Yorkers throughout the late 1800s. In the 1980s, St. Vincent’s nurses faced HIV, a new infectious disease epidemic, and once again proved willing to care for members of a shunned group, despite an ideological opposition to homosexuality. Strausbaugh writes, “Beds overflowed, until even the corridors were commandeered, with masking tape on the floor designating ‘rooms.’ It would be likened to a military hospital in a war zone and be referred to as the ground zero of AIDS.”

Musically, New York in the 1980s witnessed a blizzard of genre-defying new forms. A more raw punk sound fused with an echo of 1960s classic rock. An underground scene of experimental jazz-adjacent music trended at small clubs like The Knitting Factory. The development of a uniquely New York style of house music and “club kid” culture flourished as disco orchestras were swapped out for syncopated drum beats and synthesizers. Ballroom, drag balls, and vogue, a stylized dance first created by black and Latino gays in the 1960s, came to the attention of mainstream culture.