Fifty-five years after an uprising gridlocked the streets of downtown Manhattan and catapulted the modern gay rights movement, a visitor center dedicated to the now-historic riots will open its doors next Friday.
The Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center will be located in the building next door to the Stonewall Inn, the site of the June 1969 Stonewall riots, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village neighborhood. The original bar included the current bar’s space and the site of the new visitor center, connected through an interior passageway that has since been sealed closed.
Its opening on the last weekend of June also coincides with the same weekend that the riots occurred in 1969. Around the world, LGBTQ Pride Month is celebrated in June in commemoration of the uprising.
“My hopes are that people come to visit the space and that they understand where they are first and foremost, that they understand the significance of the space, that they understand they are standing where history took place,” said Diana Rodriguez, the co-founder and chief executive of Pride Live, the LGBTQ advocacy group that spearheaded and will manage the center. “Secondly, that they put their phones down and really experience it.”
The center will feature an art exhibition largely curated by Mark Segal, an LGBTQ activist who took part in the 1969 uprising. It will include replicas of the original bar’s jukebox and a rotating exhibition by LGBTQ youths and allies in conjunction with the Parsons School of Design.
“It’s 2,100 square feet,” Rodriguez said. “And like any New Yorker, we tried to make the best and the most of every inch of space that we had.”
Aside from the facade of the interior brick passageway, none of the original space was preserved in the years before the center’s inception in 2022. Admission to the center — which was financed largely by corporate donations — will be free and available to visitors of all ages. Google, Amazon, AARP, JPMorgan Chase and Comcast NBCUniversal, which is the parent company of NBC News, are among the charter founding partners.
The Obama administration designated the bar and Christopher Park, located across the street, as a national monument. The monument is governed by the National Park Service, which will also use the new center as a base for its local rangers.
Since its designation as a national monument, thousands of anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the country, including more than 520 this year, according to a tally by the American Civil Liberties Union. Decades-old tropes that LGBTQ people — and particularly gay men and transgender women — are trying to “groom” or “indoctrinate” children have also been introduced into the mainstream of the nation’s political discourse.
“When we started this six years ago, I was like, ‘Wow, this can be really important and impactful,’” Rodriguez said. “Watching the last six years, I’m like, ‘Wow, this is really needed.’”
While anti-LGBTQ legislation and charged rhetoric have largely taken place outside of New York City, the Stonewall National Monument has not been spared from recent hostility toward the LGBTQ community.
Just last week, 160 rainbow Pride flags lining New York City’s Stonewall National Monument for Pride Month were vandalized — for the second year in a row — according to police. It was one of several acts of vandalism against Pride flags and other Pride-themed decorations across the country since the start of Pride Month.
Rodriguez hopes that as more people are exposed to LGBTQ history through spaces like the visitor center, assaults on the community will dwindle, she said.
“It’s very easy to attack something you don’t know. Hopefully not so easy as you come to know people,” Rodriguez said. “It’s going to be a long and arduous process, but that is my hope for this place.”
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