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On Nov. 9, 1970, after years of heroin addiction, Vicente Alba decided to finally stop using drugs.

He had settled in the South Bronx from Panama City when he was 10. By 14, he was regularly shooting up. And he wasn’t alone: Substance abuse was common among teenagers and young people in the neighborhood, as he recalled in a recent interview. But he couldn’t have predicted that his decision would coincide with a revolutionary moment in American history.

The next day, the Young Lords, a radical Puerto Rican civil rights group, took over Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx for the second time that year to demand better health care for all.

Their first takeover, in July, was a daylong affair while Young Lords negotiated with city and hospital officials. News coverage of the move helped raise broader awareness about the hospital’s unsuitable conditions, but did little to improve care. The second takeover, in November, led to a program that lasted eight years.

Activists saw the hospital as emblematic of the city’s neglect of the area, and community members often called it “the butcher shop” because of the high mortality rate and the dangerous conditions — dilapidated ceilings, cockroaches, blood-spattered floors.