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Building Blocks How the city looks and feels — and why it got that way.

David W. Dunlap/The New York

Spring 1989 would not have seemed like the ideal moment to celebrate gay sex.

The number of AIDS cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control was about to reach 100,000. (It had taken seven years for the first 50,000 to accumulate; a year and a half for the next 50,000.) Most cases involved gay or bisexual men. The artist Keith Haring, 31, was one of those men. And he was nine months away from death.

But at the invitation of the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center to join a show of site-specific artwork for the building, at 208 West 13th Street, Mr. Haring chose the second-floor men’s room. He covered every wall surface that was not tiled — and a few of those, too — with an ebullient, graphic, homoerotic, black-and-white, cartoon depiction of sexual activity, sexual organs, sexual fetishism and sexual desire.

The Keith Haring Bathroom, as it is now called, has been stripped of toilets, sinks and stalls and is used as a meeting room. But to show off a recently completed $25,000 conservation of the mural, the center will open the room to public view through March and conduct related programs.

Because Mr. Haring titled the mural “Once Upon a Time,” one cannot help seeing it as rudely elegiac, a lusty last cry for the lost days of id. The sexual revolution, only a decade past, seemed by 1989, as if it had happened in some other century in some other city. Yet “Once Upon a Time” is also such a joyful work. Mr. Haring seems to have been publicly affirming the vitality of sex and its centrality to gay identity, and, with every suggestive squiggle and radiant line, having a lot of fun doing so.

“There was such shame and fear at the time,” said Glennda Testone, the executive director of what is now known as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center. “And he found a way to tap into sexual exuberance and celebration.” One message of the mural, Ms. Testone said, is: “We’re fine. We’re better than fine. We’re great.”

That message has resonated around the world. Robert A. Woodworth, the director of capital projects at the center, said, “People will show up speaking some language other than English, with a camera, and say two words at the front desk: ‘Keith Haring.'”

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times

Unfortunately, the medium was less enduring than the message. The Center Show of 1989 was supposed to last only a few months. Mr. Haring did little or nothing to prepare the walls to receive a mural. Instead, he just covered the existing paint job, some of which was already flaking off. An open window was no friend of the artwork, either, which wound up with a mantle of gray grime.

The good news is that the mural “has held up remarkably well – considering,” said Harriet Irgang Alden, the conservation director of Rustin Levenson Art Conservation Associates, which handled the job. In this phase, Ms. Alden and her colleagues flattened peeling paint chips back down to the wall plane with a hot-air tool and adhesive. They also cleaned off the sooty cloak.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times

More substantive repairs and repainting are planned for the project’s second phase. When the larger holes are patched, the center and its conservators will have to wrestle with that perennial dilemma in art restoration: Should the patches be left blank and not be filled in by another hand? Or is the overall work better served by re-creating the visual composition?

No one needs to answer the question until $20,000 more is raised. (The first phase was paid for by Mark Fletcher and Tobias Meyer, prominent figures in the art world.)

It remains to be seen whether Mr. Haring’s priapic panorama, which is scarcely to everyone’s taste, can gain widespread support. Ms. Testone believes it can. “I’m not offended by it at all,” she said. “It makes me wish for a visual celebration like this of women’s sexual attraction to women.”

That said, she confessed, “When I did walk in here for the first time, I said, ‘I have never seen so many penises in my life.'”