Who is the Village For? the troubled history of the Northern Dispensary
By Salonee Bhaman
The dusty red brick façade of the Northern Dispensary sports a hand-lettered sign, a throwback to a bygone era. Built in a neo-Georgian style, the triangular, three-story building occupies the entirety of its oddly shaped, now-trendy West Village block bound by Christopher Street, Grove Street, and on two sides by Waverly Place. Remarkably, given its bustling and costly surroundings, the Dispensary is empty—a shell observing a city in constant flux. Underwritten by a mixture of public and private funds, the building and the land it sits on fall under a restrictive deed requiring that the premises serve the poor and infirm. Just what that requirement means has become a question determining much of the Dispensary’s fate over the 20th century.
Originally constructed in 1831 to house the fledgling Greenwich Village Free Medical Clinic, the building was a philanthropic venture designed to provide care to the working-class neighbors and domestic servants of the wealthy in the area, and to reduce communicable illness in the interest of public health. The founders of the Dispensary saw it as a valuable contribution to both social welfare and scientific good—particularly well-positioned to study the diseases of the working poor otherwise not receiving medical care. It served more than three thousand patients and was busy enough by 1855 to require the installation of a third floor. By the middle of the 20th century, the Dispensary was primarily providing free dental care, but its operators’ reluctance to serve people with AIDS led to its shuttering in 1988.
The Northern Dispensary’s “fall” is often recounted as a parable about the idiosyncratic mixture of government regulation and real estate capital investment that have shaped the built environment of New York City. The story typically begins with the lawsuit against the Dispensary brought by George Whitmore and David Whittacre, two gay men denied treatment due to their AIDS diagnoses. The lawsuit, settled by the New York City Human Rights Commission, awarded Whittacre and Whitmore $46,000 in damages; the Dispensary soon closed its doors, citing financial troubles.[1]
The Roman Catholic Church stepped in to purchase the building with a plan to use it as an AIDS clinic, only to sell it to a real estate developer interested in preserving historic Village buildings a few years later. As various cyclical newspaper articles and blog posts probing the building’s history have lamented, the deed restrictions have prevented its development in the context of New York’s 21st century real estate market. And so it sits empty: a historic property, decaying from within.
A closer examination of the fight over its future, however, reveals that the drama surrounding the closure of the Northern Dispensary is less an aberration than an exemplar of the particular politics of care work, homelessness, race, and neighborhood politics that have embroiled New York City since the 1980s. When George Whitmore and David Whittacre brought suit against the Northern Dispensary in 1986, New York City was an epicenter of the newly named AIDS epidemic. The city had the highest rate of seropositivity anywhere in the country, and had recorded over 6,978 deaths due to AIDS-related complications by 1985; the true number was likely higher due to undiagnosed cases.[2]
Greenwich Village suffered a disproportionate loss of life and illness during the epidemic’s first years. To many in affected communities, it seemed that the world was uninterested in the rapidly spreading and often fatal symptoms overtaking friends, lovers, and family members. Between 1981 and 1983, the gay and lesbian press was nearly alone in covering AIDS. Mainstream publications and city politicians were slow to react, allocate resources, or address a disease that seemed primarily to affect gay men.
In the absence of funding, grassroots organizers began to provide social services and resources for people with AIDS. Groups like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) stepped up where the city fell short, creating extensive programs to ensure that people with the condition had help at home, emotional support, and assistance navigating the various welfare bureaucracies.
By 1983, AIDS had entered the mainstream discourse in a new and profound way, through popular theater and prominent articles about the disease in national weekly magazines. Public officials in areas deeply affected by AIDS had also begun to mobilize the social service infrastructure of their respective cities to respond to the crisis. Unfortunately, increased public attention also often produced public hysteria stoked in the mainstream press. Although there was no evidence that HIV could be transmitted via casual contact, many carriers faced prejudice and discrimination from both the general public and intimate family members.[3] Landlords were reported for evicting tenants whom they discovered were HIV+, and in the Fall of 1985 nearly 11,000 parents kept children home from school to protest the Department of Education’s policy allowing students with AIDS to continue attending public school.[4]
The legality of discrimination based on an AIDS diagnosis was murky: insurance companies often cited evidence of seropositivity as a pre-existing condition when denying coverage for AIDS treatment, and Immigration and Naturalization Services listed HIV+ status as grounds for permanent exclusion from naturalization. Many advocacy groups, like the GMHC, even counseled those at risk for HIV not to get tested if they feared reprisal. For those unable to afford medical care or housing without public assistance, not getting tested was often impossible: the State often required it for access to services like Medicaid and supportive housing.
Legal advocacy groups like Lambda Legal Assistance, the ACLU, and Legal Aid proved instrumental in fighting for the rights of those who had been fired, evicted, or denied services due to their HIV/AIDS status. In an attempt to address widespread harassment and discrimination, Mayor Ed Koch appointed thirteen new commissioners to the Human Rights Commission in 1988; two of them were openly gay. This move—along with settlements and fines remitted to Whitmore, Whittacre, and several other plaintiffs who experienced medical discrimination—was an attempt to do the right thing by vulnerable New Yorkers while reducing the burden that the refusal of private sector actors to house and treat people with HIV/AIDS had imposed on various public accommodations.
It was also an attempt to stave off the public hysteria that threatened to cause unrest regularly during this period. As civil court judge Diedre L. Tomkins noted in her decision in the Northern Dispensary case, healthcare workers were held to a higher standard by virtue of their public position: “When the public sees health care workers shirk from contact with an infected individual, unwarranted public fear is reinforced.” [5]
This dynamic of exclusion was most visible in the treatment of city residents with HIV/AIDS experiencing homelessness—by then one of the greatest challenges facing New York City’s municipal service apparatus. Deinstitutionalization of large mental health facilities, austerity measures for city services, and the dramatic redevelopment of Single Room Occupancy hotels (SROs), into luxury developments had sent New York City’s street homeless population soaring in the 1980s. As historian Benjamin Holtzman has shown, a variety of activists and community members tackled the problem through the decade—filing lawsuits, challenging building and tax policies incentivizing displacement, and advocating on behalf of each other and the homeless on many fronts. Groups like the Coalition for the Homeless had made considerable strides getting City officials to establish emergency shelters for men, women, and families experiencing homelessness through the decade.
These shelters, however, posed challenges for a growing homeless population with AIDS. When the Dispensary closed its doors as a free dental clinic in 1988, the City estimated that this group numbered nearly four thousand. One official projected it could rise as high as 26,000 by the end of the year.[6] These rising numbers reflected the changing demographics of AIDS in the City. The fastest-growing infected groups in New York were intravenous drug users and people of color in the outer boroughs and upper Manhattan, rather than white, gay men in the Village. While individuals in these demographics may have previously found themselves able to afford SRO housing on a week-to-week basis, the shortage of these residencies drove many into the street. As New York City’s health commissioner observed in 1986, the “AIDS population served by NYC is larger, more likely to be homeless, and has fewer social and financial resources” than in cities like San Francisco.[7]
How to house this growing population with unstable living quarters had become a dire question for the city. Many experiencing homelessness and AIDS found themselves in public hospitals, which could not discharge them without adequate housing. While Koch’s housing plan promised many new shelters for the homeless, advocates for people with HIV/AIDS were quick to point out that these large congregate facilities were unsuitable for individuals with compromised immune systems. Several reports emerged of shelter residents facing violence and harassment from fellow residents, or indifference and negligence from staff when their HIV status was revealed or suspected. Building smaller, scatter-site housing for these individuals was vastly preferable.
However, Koch had run into significant trouble placing even small, non-AIDS specific homeless shelters around New York City. Neighborhood representatives at the City Board of Estimate had shot down all smaller shelter proposals in Ditmas Park, Riverdale, and Staten Island. As Stoffer notes, “Even the most liberal neighborhoods did not want to deal with incontinent drug dependent or mentally ill homeless men and women as part of their daily routine.”[8] The problem was even more pronounced when it came to allocating beds for AIDS services: Koch had faced severe pushback when trying to allow AIDS patients into nursing home facilities in Elmhurst, Queens, Staten Island, and the east side of Manhattan. Eventually, he bowed to resident protests and scrapped these plans. Individuals with HIV/AIDS and no place to go remained warehoused in City hospitals, at great public cost.[9] How to house these individuals in a medically appropriate and humane way was an urgent policy question.
The Roman Catholic Church’s proposal to convert the Northern Dispensary, not into a clinic, but rather a fifteen room SRO structure and a community kitchen for People with AIDS suffering from substance abuse and mental health issues, reflected a sincere engagement with the most pressing needs of vulnerable New Yorkers: housing services. The plan, which relied on a $1.5 million government grant to repurpose the space into a supportive residential facility, gained official approval in 1992. The new facility would be one of just a handful of supportive housing facilities for New Yorkers with HIV/AIDS, a victory for activists after years of agitation.
Unfortunately for those potential residents, people in the neighborhood began registering their opposition. Organizing under the name “Committee for the Northern Dispensary,” several Greenwich Village locals opposed the conversion vociferously. Sensitive to claims that they were prejudiced or NIMBYs, the group protested the structure by turning to its original restrictive deed covenant. Their leader, a gay man named Kenneth Ranftle, argued that “turning a historic landmark for just 15 people” would be an irresponsible use of space. He took particular issue with the fact that occupants would be granted leases to their rooms, which he argued converted a “public mission into a private purpose.” [10] In an effort to demonstrate that prejudice was not its motivation, the Coalition noted its preference for a “dental clinic for HIV positive people” or a “women’s health center” in that space.
The subtext of their protest was less innocent to some. As one ACT UP protest flier read: “How do you spell NIMBY? Coalition for the Northern Dispensary.” Another featured the caption: “You know they wouldn’t oppose AIDS housing here if it was for WHITE BOYS ONLY.” Both fliers speak to the complicated racial and class politics that had come to define rifts within AIDS activism. While the popular conception of AIDS as a “gay disease” still centered white, gay, men—the reality was that AIDS in New York City had become a largely black and brown condition. Questions about how best to serve people with AIDS emerged as a struggle within even the ranks of ACT UP—with some members splitting off into direct service work in community health and housing access, and others doubling down on the search for a pharmaceutical cure for AIDS.[11]
The tensions within this struggle were further underscored by the changing face of Greenwich Village by the early 1990s. As a New York Magazine article from August of 1993 entitled “The Village Under Siege” noted, some new Village residents felt resentful of the expectation that the historically gay, immigrant neighborhood would continue to allow disorder, noise, and activity on the streets. The article, which also details the struggles of a group called Concerned Citizens of Broadway to ban street peddlers from the area, quotes an anonymous member of the Coalition on the Northern Dispensary critiquing the local community board’s SRO plan as “serving a blueprint, an ideology—not their constituents,” before clarifying, “They have 1965 ideas in place in 1993.” In the words of the article’s author, the “very things that made the Village what it has now made it nearly unlivable” to them.[12]
This attitude also reflected a larger reality about the increasing centrality of gentrification, whiteness, and capital to late 20th century gay political organizing. Today, there is a tentative discussion among those entrusted with decision-making power about using the Dispensary as a public information center for the recently landmarked Stonewall National Memorial just across the street. Nearby, the site where St. Vincent’s Hospital once treated and housed thousands dying of AIDS has been converted into luxury condominiums. An information center is, admittedly, a relatively unobjectionable use for the building in a landscape now peppered by expensive clothing stores and well-reviewed eateries.[13]
It is, however, a purpose that belies the daily reality of the AIDS and homelessness crises that never ended for thousands in New York City. Instead, it speaks to the way AIDS is remembered—or not—in the presentation of the Village’s gay history to newcomers, tourists, and homeowners alike: a sad story that is preserved in amber, frozen in time rather than dynamic and evolving. In this telling of AIDS history, there are few villains, many forgotten names, and no calls to action for the present.
Salonee Bhaman is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her research focuses on the political economy of social provision during the AIDS epidemic, with particular attention towards issues of housing and care work.
[1] Elizabeth A. Harris, “At High-Priced Corner, a Building Forlorn,” New York Times, March 25, 2013; Gabe Herman, “Gottlieb Co. Getting Active, but Not on Northern Dispensary,” The Villager, January 3, 2019; Spencer Cohen,“Daily What?! Why the Northern Dispensary, a Prime Piece of Real Estate in Greenwich Village, Remains Empty,” Untapped New York, May 13, 2014; James Nevius, “Everything You Know about the Village Is Wrong,” New York Post, March 29, 2017.
[2] New York City Department of Health, “Aids Diagnoses and Persons Living with HIV/AIDS by Year, Pre 1981-2018, New York City.” Department of Health, Mental Health HIV Epidemiology and Field Services Program, n.d., https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/ah/surveillance-trend-tables.pdf.
[3] Bruce Lambert, “AIDS Program Fails Many, Patients Say,” New York Times, October 21, 1989. For some of the vast literature on care provision, diagnosis, and services, see Jonathan Bell, “Rethinking the ‘Straight State’: Welfare Politics, Health Care, and Public Policy in the Shadow of AIDS,” Journal of American History 104, no. 4 (2018): 931–52; Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (Univ of North Carolina Press, 2009); Martin Duberman, Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS (New Press, 2014); David France, How to Survive a Plague : The inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS (Knopf, 2016); Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS (Routledge, 1990).
[4] Jennifer Brier, “‘Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS Out:’ Anti-AIDS Activism and the Legacy of Community Control in Queens, New York,” Journal of Social History (Summer 2006): 965-87.
[5] “The New York HRC,” Update, October 19, 1988.
[6] “Homelessness: Can It Be Solved?” The West Side Spirit, February 21, 1988.
[7] Jonathan Soffer, Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City (Columbia University Press, 2010), 315.
[8] Ibid., 183.
[9] Jane Gross, “For New York Aids Patients, Few Places to Ease the Dying,” New York Times, June 12, 1987.
[10] Christopher Gray, “Streetscapes / The Northern Dispensary; Plan to House Homeless with AIDS Stirs a Protest,” New York Times, October 10, 1993.
[11] New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed December 3, 2019, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e3-1c89-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.
[12] Michael Gross, “Village Under Siege,” New York Magazine, August 16, 1993.
[13] Christina B. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Duke University Press, 2013); Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (University of California Press, 2012).