Moore Street, just three-fifths of a mile long, extends from one Bushwick extreme to the other: it starts at the Lindsay Park Mitchell-Lama co-ops and ends at Roberta’s. Half a century ago, this palimpsestic street, which now boasts live poultry shops and blackened cinderblock walls obscuring whatever happens behind them, had no subsidized housing and no overpriced pizza—but it was the home of perhaps one of the earliest AIDS victims in the world: Ardouin Antonio, who died in Kings County Hospital, a few blocks from Prospect Park in East Flatbush, on June 28, 1959—a decade before the first confirmed case in the US, and twenty years before the HIV-AIDS epidemic would overtake New York City and the rest of the world. “Asked whether he believed, in retrospect, that [Antonio] might have had AIDS,” the Chicago Tribune reported in 1987, “the pathologist who performed the man’s autopsy replied, ‘You bet.’
“‘It was so unusual at the time,’ [he] said. ‘Lord knows how many cases of AIDS have been autopsied that we didn’t even know had AIDS.’”
No one knows how long HIV-AIDS has existed, but the most up-to-date theories say that the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus morphed into the Human Immunodeficiency Virus and then jumped from primates to people in Africa around 1908, or perhaps in the 1930s, probably through contact with bushmeat: chimpanzee blood infecting a human open wound, maybe on the hand. The disease began to spread a bit later, driven by a combination of factors affecting Africa throughout the 20th century: urbanization, increased mobility, changing sexual mores and reused needles (from vaccinations). Documented cases appeared in Kinshasa, in what was then Zaire, in 1959 and 1960, and seemingly isolated cases began to appear around the world thereafter.
