Inside Giovanni's Room
Throughout the 1980s, Giovanni’s Room had trouble with bricks. As the gay rights movement swelled and AIDS steadily ravaged the community, every now and then a single brick would come crashing through the bookstore’s front window. There were about 17 to 20 bricks in total, and owner Ed Hermance has no idea who threw them. But this stream of vandalism didn’t get him down — he took the bricks home and used them to build a walkway in front of his house. “The reason I took them home is because they were good bricks,” he told a reporter in 1993. “What was I going to do, drop them in the trash?”