Long-vacant storefront that once housed part of the Stonewall Inn reclaims place in LGBTQ+ history

NEW YORK — It was half of it the Stonewall Innthe gay dive bar where a 1969 police raid became a major event milestone moment for the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

Yet for much of the 55 years since, there has been little outward indication that 51 Christopher St. was part of that history.

It housed the Stonewall’s largest bar and one of two dance floors that attracted a young, diverse crowd. But after the raid led to a riot and the Stonewall was closed, 51 Christopher St. became a bagel shop, briefly a gay bar, a clothing store, a nail salon and then a vacant space. The large “STONEWALL INN” sign was installed in 1989, a few years before a new version of the tavern next door opened.

Now the community is reclaiming the building and its place in history. It opens as the Stonewall National Monument visitor center on Friday, the anniversary of the 1969 uprising that had a major impact on LGBTQ+ life in the United States in subsequent decades.

“If you look around the world today, there are millions of people celebrating Pride. And it all started in this building,” visitor center senior advisor Mark Segal said recently as he showed it off to guests.

The gay activist and publisher was faced with a discovery made during construction: a bricked-up doorway that once connected the two parts of the original Stonewall Inn.

The doorway Segal himself had walked through on the early morning of June 28, 1969, as an 18-year-old who had just moved from Philadelphia to New York City’s Greenwich Village and found the LGBTQ+ community he longed for.

What happened in the hours that followed would anger him, and many others – and also give them a new sense of purpose.

“It told me we had to be loud and proud,” he recalls.

The visitor center aims to tell the Stonewall story in more depth than the monument itself, which is centered on a small park with historic photographs but limited interpretive information. Overseen by the National Park Service and LGBTQ+ advocacy group Pride Live, the $3.2 million visitor center was funded primarily by private donations, with the exception of $450,000 from the Park Service’s Charities Division, which receives private and federal money.

“When people think of the National Park Service, they don’t usually think of ‘queer and urban,’” says visitor center co-founder Diana Rodriguez. “So we are a very different kind of visitor center.”

Where other such facilities might have plaques about wildlife and geology, this one has photos of protests and a line on the floor showing where the worn bar once stood. A 1967 jukebox, the same model that played the night of the Stonewall Rebellion, is packed with songs from that era and beyond.

The Stonewall Inn, which spanned two former horse stables at 51 and 53 Christopher St., was a speakeasy-style establishment with blacked-out windows, steel doors, a doorman who kept an eye on customers, no liquor license and notoriously expensive drinks.

At the time, LGBTQ+ social life in New York City was an open secret, but a risky and suppressed one nonetheless. From the 1950s to 1973, the American psychiatric establishment classified homosexuality as a mental illness. Law enforcement agencies in New York and elsewhere deemed expressions of LGBTQ+ identity — from dancing or showing affection with a same-sex partner to wearing gender-fluid clothing — as illegal.

The police regularly raided gay bars. Customers usually left quietly, rather than risk arrest, which could expose their sexual orientation and cost them jobs and family relationships.

But when officers showed up at the Stonewall that day, customers 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 as he stood near the dance floor of 51 Christopher St. – his favorite side of the Stonewall – and watched what he remembers as officers dealt with him roughly. Customers in news and other reports describe police checking or threatening to check the gender of some people based on their clothing, and some being arrested (the police station). apologized in 2019 for his actions).

Some customers resisted arrest as they were taken to police cars. Officers responded rudely. A growing crowd began throwing coins, bottles and more at police.

The officers then retreated and barricaded themselves in the bar. Some in the crowd outside tried to break in. Riot police showed up 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 had sometimes demonstrated and even fought with police before. But at the end of a decade of anti-civil rights, women’s liberation, and anti-Vietnam War protests, the Stonewall uprising ushered in a broader and more confrontational phase of LGBTQ+ rights activism.

Many new groups formed and pushed for anti-discrimination laws, held demonstrations and social events in public, and otherwise demanded rights and recognition.

What became annual Pride marches began on the first Stonewall anniversary. The site of the uprising, including both parts of the original Stonewall Inn, became a National Historic Landmark in 2000 — and in 2016, the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ+ history.

Meanwhile, the current Stonewall Inn has served as a kind of unofficial welcome and education location for the monument.

“I’m here for the history,” co-owner Kurt Kelly explained in a recent interview in the still-cavelike bar, decorated with photos and documents. The original Stonewall Inn closed shortly after the uprising, but the 53 Christopher St. unit reopened in the 1990s as a gay bar. Kelly and co-owner Stacy Lentz took it over in 2006.

They see the visitor center as a fitting neighbor and hope it will attract more people to the site and bar. The past few years have been tough, they said, because of pandemic shutdowns, inflation, rising insurance costs and other challenges.

“It’s really hard to keep this place open,” Lentz says, but she feels a responsibility that goes beyond the bar world. She also works 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, that fight would lead him to a lifetime of advocacy, including founding a gay youth group, disrupting 1970s TV news and talk shows to push for coverage of LGBTQ+ rights issues, lobbying government officials, founding the Philadelphia Gay News, and developing affordable housing for LGBTQ+ seniors.

And one day last year, it led him back to 51 Christopher St., with the 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 that and danced at Stonewall for the first time in 50 years,” he said. “And it brought back memories, and it brought back tears.”