NEW YORK — It was half the Stonewall Innthe gay bar where a 1969 police raid turned into a landmark moment for the movement for LGBTQ+ rights.
Yet for much of the 55 years since then, there has been little outward indication that 51 Christopher St. is part of that history.
It housed Stonewall’s largest bar and one of two dance floors that attracted its young and diverse crowd. But after the attack sparked a riot and Stonewall closed, 51 Christopher St. became a bagel shop, a gay bar again briefly, a clothing store, a nail salon and then a vacant space. Its large “STONEWALL INN” sign came down in 1989, a few years before a new version of the tavern opened next door.
Now the community is reclaiming the building and its place in history. It opens like the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center on Friday, the anniversary of the 1969 riot that helped reshape LGBTQ+ life in the United States for decades to come.
“Today, if you look around the world, there are millions of people celebrating Pride. And it all started in this building,” visitor center senior consultant Mark Segal said recently as he showed it off to guests.
The gay activist and editor stood before a discovery made during construction: a bricked-up door that once connected the two sections of the original Stonewall Inn.
The same door that Segal himself walked through on the morning of June 28, 1969, when he was 18 years old and had just moved from Philadelphia to New York’s Greenwich Village neighborhood and found the LGBTQ+ community he longed for.
What happened over the next few hours would enrage him and many others – and also give them a new sense of purpose.
“It told me we had to be loud and proud,” he recalled.
The visitor center aims to tell the story of Stonewall in more depth than the monument itself, which is centered around a small park that features historical photographs but limited interpretive information. Overseen by the National Park Service and the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Pride Live, the $3.2 million visitor center was funded primarily with private donations, except $450,000 from the park service’s charitable arm, which receives money private and federal.
“When people think of the National Park Service, they don’t usually think of ‘queer and urban,’” said visitor center co-founder Diana Rodriguez. “So we are a very different type of visitor center.”
Where other facilities might have signs about wildlife and geology, this one has photographs of protests and a line on the floor marking where the weathered bar once stood. A 1967 jukebox, the same model that played the night of the Stonewall Riots, is filled with music from the era and beyond.
Encompassing two former stables at 51 and 53 Christopher St., the Stonewall Inn was a speakeasy-like establishment, with tinted windows, steel doors, a doorman who screened patrons, no license to sell liquor and notorious drinks. faces.
At the time, LGBTQ+ social life in New York City was an open secret, but still risky and repressed. From the 1950s until 1973, the US psychiatric system classified homosexuality as a mental illness. Law enforcement in New York and elsewhere frequently considered expressions of LGBTQ+ identity illegal — from dancing or showing affection with a same-sex partner to wearing gender-fluid attire.
Police frequently raid gay bars. Clients often left quietly rather than risk an arrest that could expose their sexual orientation and cost them jobs and family relationships.
But when the cops showed up at Stonewall that day, the patrons and their friends suddenly and spontaneously decided they had had enough.
“If the police can do this to us, anyone can do this to us,” Segal remembers thinking while on the dance floor at 51 Christopher St. News and other accounts describe police checking or threatening to check the sex of some people based on their clothing and arresting some (the police department). apologized in 2019 for their actions).
Some customers resisted arrest as they were taken to police vehicles. The officers responded rudely. A growing crowd began throwing coins, bottles and more at police.
The police then retreated and barricaded themselves inside the bar. Some in the crowd outside tried to break in. Riot police appeared to clear the protesters, but they continued to regroup and return until about 4:30 am.
Protests and clashes with police continued over the following nights.
LGBTQ+ Americans have demonstrated and even fought with police before. But at the end of a decade of civil rights, women’s liberation and protests against the Vietnam War, the Stonewall rebellion triggered a broader, more confrontational phase of LGBTQ+ rights activism.
Many new groups formed and lobbied for anti-discrimination laws, held outdoor rallies and social events, and demanded rights and recognition.
What became annual Pride marches began on the first anniversary of Stonewall. The site of the riot, including both parts of the original Stonewall Inn, became a National Historic Landmark in 2000 – and, in 2016, the first US national monument dedicated to LGBTQ+ history.
Meanwhile, the current Stonewall Inn served as a sort of unofficial welcome and education site for the monument.
“I’m here for the history,” co-owner Kurt Kelly explained in a recent interview in the bar that still looks like an office, adorned with photos and documents. The original Stonewall Inn closed shortly after the uprising, but 53 Christopher St. reopened as a gay bar in the 1990s. Kelly and co-owner Stacy Lentz acquired it in 2006.
They see the visitor center as a suitable neighbor and hope it will draw more people to the venue and bar. The last few years have been difficult, they said, due to pandemic shutdowns, inflation, rising insurance costs and other challenges.
“It’s really hard to keep this place open,” Lentz said, but she feels a responsibility that goes beyond the bar business. She also serves as CEO of the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, a charity she and Kelly launched in 2017.
“The fight that started here on Christopher Street in 1969 is not over,” Lentz said.
For Segal, this fight would lead to a lifetime of advocacy, including founding a gay youth group, stopping 1970s TV news and talk shows to push for coverage of LGBTQ+ rights issues, lobbying of authorities, the establishment of the Philadelphia Gay News and the development of affordable housing for LGBTQ+ Seniors.
And one day last year, it took him back inside 51 Christopher St., with Fifth Dimension’s 1969 “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” queued up on his cell phone.
“I went to the back of the bar and played and danced at Stonewall for the first time in about 50 years,” he said. “And it brought back memories and tears.”
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