For decades, visitors flocking to New York for Pride every June found plenty of packed bars and jubilant parties but no easy way to engage with the city’s rich L.G.B.T.Q. history.
Even Sheridan Square, the center of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising that catalyzed the gay liberation movement, had little to see for anyone interested in the queer past.
“The guest experience when they got there was a bar, a bench and a park,” said Ross Levi, a director and vice president at the New York State Division of Tourism. “That isn’t terribly helpful for somebody who comes during the day when the bar is closed. It’s not terribly helpful if you have kids that you want to bring and learn about the history of the area.”
The building that houses the new center sits next door to the current Stonewall Inn bar (which opened in the early 1990s). But back in the late 1960s, an earlier bar of the same name occupied both spaces, which were connected by an interior doorway. Not long after the riots, the original Stonewall Inn went out of business, and the connecting doorway was bricked up.
The storefront next to the current Stonewall Inn stood empty in 2022, when Diana Rodriguez, the chief executive of Pride Live, an L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group, took over the space. Nail salon chairs from the previous tenant still lined the walls.
Ms. Rodriguez raised more than $3 million, much of it from corporate donors, to build the visitors’ center, which her organization will manage. The center will offer National Park Service rangers working at the monument a much-needed roof over their heads (they currently have to use local businesses’ restrooms) and give visitors of all ages a place to share in the monument’s history through a number of exhibits (free admission).
“My hope is that people come in, learn more about Stonewall,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “And then, at the end of their time here, that they feel compelled to take action.”
The new visitors’ center in Manhattan is just one site that offers a glimpse into New York City’s queer history. Here are four more, one in each other borough.
Staten Island
In 1994, the activist group Lesbian Avengers marched to a charming white cottage on Staten Island’s eastern waterfront chanting, “Alice was a lesbian, and a lesbian she’ll always be.” That house, originally built in 1690, once belonged to Alice Austen, a groundbreaking documentary photographer who captured a quickly changing New York City at the turn of the 20th…
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