Building with Empathy

The Ambassador Hotel, 1980s-mid-1990s

The Tenderloin, San Francisco, CA 

The Ambassador was a residential hotel established in 1921 in the Tenderloin offering cheap lodging in rooms with minimal amenities. At the onset of the AIDS crisis, Hank Wilson, a longtime housing and AIDS activist who managed the residential hotel, opened its doors to low-income people living with AIDS (PWAs). Ambassador residents often had no other place to go, rejected by their families, social circles, and other non-profit organizations. Under Wilson’s leadership, major emphasis was placed on treating PWAs with respect, and honoring their choices about their lives, though within guidelines for collective living set by the manager.  

Empathetic treatment of PWAs, most of whom were at the end of their lives, marked the Ambassador apart from other AIDS programs in the city and led to a number of features in local and national media. The building effectively functioned as an emergency shelter from the mid-1980s to at least 1996, pioneering a model of treatment that brought AIDS services to the building rather than requiring PWAs, who had to contend with the myriad challenges on their bodies that the disease posed to travel to health clinics. 

Paul Fusco’s photographic portfolio AIDS at the Ambassador Hotel (1993) reveals the striking extent of AIDS devastation. Fusco entered the rooms and corridors where PWAs lived and socialized, received doctor visits, and developed romantic relationships. Some of Fusco’s photographs include extended descriptions of their subjects. Commenting on the photograph on the right, Fusco noted, “Aerial's I.Q. must be 150. 20 years ago he was a psychologist working with autistic children. He says he's a hippie who never left the scene.”  

Ambassador staff recorded their interactions with residents in daily logs. They included information about each resident's specific needs and follow-up instructions. The records presented in this section are dated after 1990 when a rather sophisticated structure of AIDS care was firmly in place.