A memorial to honor victims of the AIDS epidemic was dedicated Thursday in New York City, just in time for World AIDS Day.

The 18-foot-high steel sculpture sits at the entrance to a new park adjacent to a historic hospital, which housed the city’s largest AIDS ward and features prominently in the history of the disease. In the early years of the epidemic, many hospitals refused to care for people with HIV/AIDS because of uncertainty about how it was transmitted. St. Vincent’s Hospital, in the city’s Greenwich Village neighborhood, was one of the few that did admit AIDS patients, and it became an epicenter of the epidemic.