Did AIDS Come to Bushwick in the 1950s?

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.’