Partner Michael Hannaway
Queer Places:
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720
130 Barrow St, New York, NY 10014
Dr.
Nathaniel H. Pier (1952 - December 27, 1989) was an internist whose practice
consisted largely of AIDS patients. In New York City in the 1980s he was among
the first private physicians to treat people with HIV and AIDS. He was 37 when
he died in 1989.
Dr. Pier had maintained a private practice in Manhattan since 1984. He was on the staff of the St. Mark's Clinic Community Health Project. He was also a founding member of New York Physicians for Human Rights and a director of the Community Research Initiative, an AIDS research group.
He was involved in efforts to press for faster development of anti-AIDS drugs and for swift approval of those drugs by the Federal Government.
Dr. Pier graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He trained in pediatrics at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and later completed a fellowship in neurological diseases at St. Mary's Hospital in London.
He died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome at Roosevelt Hospital on December 27, 1989. He was 37 years old and lived in Manhattan. He was survived by his mother, Mollie Pier of Los Angeles, and his companion, Michael Hannaway.
Mollie Pier founded nonprofit Project Chicken Soup to give meaning to the short life of her son Nathaniel. The organization provides kosher meals for people throughout Los Angeles County living with HIV or AIDS and has become a link not only to her son but to hundreds of others. Piers cofounded Project Chicken Soup in 1989 and has seen the group evolve from a few volunteers to dozens who gather twice a month in a kosher kitchen in Culver City to cook for more than a hundred people. Until 2016, when she died, Pier called clients to make sure they will be home when the food is scheduled to be delivered and says the phone conversations are often about more than just dinner. "Sometimes, they're lonely, sometimes they're upset or not feeling well and just need an ear," Pier said. "I'm kind of the resident Jewish grandmother."
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