Texas AIDS Memorial Garden
In 1986, a year before the Quilt’s debut and five years before the National AIDS Memorial Grove broke ground in San Francisco, Michael Lee and a partner cultivated a plot of land along an abandoned railroad in Houston to create the Texas AIDS Memorial Garden. Since then, the site has become, as Lee describes on his website, “a verdant flowering oasis in the midst of the city, dedicated to the memory of those who died of AIDS. It translates their memory into a garden full of life and a habitat for butterflies and other wildlife.” Over the years, countless community members have tended the garden, cultivating its growth while fighting for the land’s integrity against would-be garbage dumpers, developers and the City of Houston, which in 2014 constructed a bike path through the garden that at the time many in the community did not want.
