The design was developed by the efforts of nearly 500 architects who came up with the idea of an 18-foot steel canopy as the gateway to the new St. Vincent's Hospital Park in Greenwich Village.

This memorial should serve, in future epidemics, both as a reminder of the dangers created, when we allow fear to rule, and of the positive outcomes that result when we unite to fight discrimination and seek solutions to our common ills."

The memorial is a gateway to a new public park adjacent to the former St. Vincent's Hospital, which housed the city's first and largest AIDS ward and which is often considered the symbolic epicenter of the disease, figuring prominently in The Normal Heart, Angels in America, and other important pieces of literature and art that tell the story of the plague years in New York.

Brooklyn-based Studio a+i, led by Mateo Paiva, Lily Lim and Esteban Erlich, won the contest and became memorial park architects.

The built memorial also features the work of visual artist Jenny Holzer whose idea was to engrave a granite panel with lines from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself".