“People With A.I.D.S Plaza,” as the street sign reads, spans Park Row between Beekman and Spruce Streets, near the approach for the Brooklyn Bridge.
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It’s technically an honorific street or a co-named street; both terms are used to described streets that have an official name but also a second one to commemorate a person or event. New York has over a thousand of these, such as “Rivera Avenue” for Mariano Rivera in front of Yankee Stadium, or the 3-block stretch of Worth Street co-named “Avenue of the Strongest” to honor city sanitation workers.
Clues about the backstory of People With A.I.D.S. Plaza aren’t easy to come by. The street may have been co-named in 1997, according to the Encyclopedia of New York City: Second Edition, but the wording isn’t clear. It’s not on a list of honorific street names compiled by a researcher named Gilbert Tauber.
Why City Hall? Possibly to mark the location where AIDS activists and allies held protests—like this one in 1989 organized by ACT UP, with more than 3,000 people protesting Mayor Koch’s handling of the disease.
Source: The honorific street name near City Hall that commemorates a plague
