Pioneering AIDS Hospital Faces Closure

St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan, a Greenwich Village institution with inextricable links to the history of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, is in danger of closing.

According to The New York Times, the struggling hospital is $700 million in debt and needed a state loan to make payroll this week. A last-minute takeover deal from a local hospital consortium was scrapped this week after negative community reaction to the proposal, which would have eliminated emergency room services and left St. Vincent's almost exclusively an outpatient hospital.

Because of its location at an epicenter of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s, the Roman Catholic hospital became one of the first and most experienced to treat the disease. It is a setting of the Tony award-winning play Angels in America by Tony Kushner.

The state has agreed to keep the hospital afloat for a month while the search for a long-term solution continues, reports the Times.