Remembering the Christopher Street Liberation Day March on its 50th Anniversary
In celebration of Pride Month and the 50th anniversary of NYC’s Pride March, LPC reflects on the history of the pivotal site and events the march was first organized to commemorate. In recent years LPC has been seeking to ensure that the diversity of the city is reflected in our designations and that as an agency we are telling the full story of all New Yorkers. In 2015, LPC designated the Stonewall Inn in 2015, the first time a site was designated as a New York City Landmark primarily for its significance to LGBT history. In 2019, on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and coinciding with World Pride NYC, LPC designated six additional sites that recognized some of the foundational locations for LGBT activism in the second half of the 20th century and important groups who fought for equality and provided support.
In June 1970, Christopher Street Park in front of the Stonewall Inn was the original starting point for the march, inaugurated a year after the Stonewall uprising as the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. Since then, the site has gained enduring significance as an inclusive space to engage and demonstrate against social and political injustices, and the march has grown exponentially from a brave protest march to an annual cultural celebration.
The two buildings that comprise the Stonewall Inn were originally built in the 1840s as stables, and in 1930 were merged at the first story and given a unified façade. Their combined ground floor commercial space originally housed a bakery, and in 1934 it was taken over by the Stonewall Inn Restaurant. The property reopened in 1967 as a gay club, retaining the name Stonewall Inn, and was included within the boundaries of the Greenwich Village Historic District when designated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) on April 29, 1969.
Two months after designation the Stonewall Inn was at the center of a pivotal moment in the LGBT Liberation Movement — the Stonewall Rebellion, one of the most important events associated with LGBT history in New York City and the nation. At about 1:20 a.m. on June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Inn was raided as part of a crackdown on New York City gay clubs. Instead of leaving the premises, the patrons of the bar remained to wait in front of the club where they were joined by friends and passersby, mostly members of the LGBT community. As the crowd grew, its members became increasingly angry at the rough treatment some prisoners were receiving and resentful of the unfairness of the situation. For more than two hours, the crowd fought back while anti-riot police tried to clear the streets. The protests and confrontations continued for the next few days until almost midnight Wednesday, July 2, 1969, with the Stonewall Inn often at the center of events.
The Stonewall uprising ushered in a new phase in the LGBT Liberation Movement. Within a few months, in direct response to Stonewall, several activist organizations were formed in New York City, including the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activists Alliance, Radicalesbians, and the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries. Soon new organizations were being established across the U.S. and around the world to promote LGBT civil rights.
If the political activism of the LGBT Liberation Movement has been characterized by the demand for “gay power,” the memorialization of Stonewall is defined by a corollary call for “gay pride” — a term that is still used today to denote the annual commemoration of the uprising during the annual Pride Parade and Pride Month. The first such event was held on June 28, 1970 in honor of the first anniversary of the uprising — a march from Greenwich Village to Central Park.
The organizers of the New York parade encouraged other gay liberation groups throughout the country to hold their own events on the same day. The first year four or five other cities participated, including Los Angeles, which held the Christopher Street West celebration, as well as San Francisco and Chicago. The following year the events spread to more cities in America, and internationally to London and Paris and Stockholm.
To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in 1979, New York City declared June as Lesbian and Gay Pride and History Month. On the 20th anniversary in 1989, the City Council voted to rename the portion of Christopher Street in front of Stonewall as Stonewall Place. The 25th-anniversary commemoration included a massive march in New York City that attracted an estimated one million participants.
On June 23, 2015, LPC designated the Stonewall Inn at 51–53 Christopher Street in Manhattan as an individual landmark in part of its commitment to recognize places associated with LGBT history. Its designation marked the first time a site was designated as a New York City Landmark primarily for its significance to LGBT history. The Stonewall Inn was designated a National Monument by President Barak Obama the following year.
Four years later in 2019, on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and coinciding with World Pride NYC, LPC designated six additional sites as individual landmarks based on their significance to LGBT history. LPC developed a framework for these designations, with support and input from the LGBT Historic Sites Project and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, that would recognize groups and individuals that helped advance the LGBT civil rights movement. The individual landmark designation reports illuminate the history of these properties that hosted seminal gay theater productions, political and community service organizations at the beginning of the LGBT civil rights movement, and served as the residences of two of the nation’s most important African-American writers and civil rights activists, the James Baldwin Residence on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the Audre Lorde Residence on Staten Island.
While the struggle to secure LGBT civil rights certainly did not begin at the Stonewall Inn, the legacy of Stonewall as the inspiration for the Gay Liberation Movement and Gay Pride events has been well established. As Martin Duberman writes in his pioneering history of Stonewall:
“Stonewall” has become synonymous over the years with gay resistance to oppression. Today the word resonates with images of insurgency and self- realization and occupies a central place in the iconography of lesbian and gay awareness. The 1969 riots are now generally taken to mark the birth of the modern gay and lesbian political movement — that moment in time when gays and lesbian recognized all at once their mistreatment their solidarity. As such, “Stonewall” has become an empowering symbol of global proportions.[i]
[i] Complete Program Transcript, Stonewall Uprising; Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993) xv.
For more information on Stonewall Inn, read LPC’s designation report.
