“The Stonewall Inn”

In honor of Pride Month, we took a stroll to the Stonewall Inn Historic Site. The Stonewall Inn (“the Stonewall”) is a historically LGBTQ+ bar located on Christopher Street in the West Village. In the 1960s, it was illegal for bars to serve anyone suspected of being gay, so the Stonewall operated illegally as a gay bar. On June 28th, 1969, the police raided the Stonewall, as they had numerous times in the past. However, this time the patrons resisted, crowding outside to chant and throw objects at the police. This led to days of rioting and inspired decades of social change and activism for LGBTQ+ rights. Now, over fifty years later, pride month is celebrated every year in June in honor of the June 1969 Stonewall uprising.

Named a National Historic Landmark in 2000, the Stonewall welcomes visitors year-round. The Stonewall and neighboring Christopher Street Park are ideal to learn more of the history of the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement.

Gay Liberation Monument

Located in Christopher Park, a small park in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, stands a permanent monument to the gay rights movement in the United States. Known as the Gay Liberation Monument, the small group of statues by artist George Segal sit and stand in couples, seeming to relax and enjoy the park, “showing the public comfort and freedom to which the gay liberation movement aspired.” The monument is positioned in front of the historic Stonewall Inn, a bar and dance hall which has catered to the LGBTQ+ community since 1966, and which was the site of the famous Stonewall Riots in the summer of 1969. The riots, led by heroes like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, began when police raided the bar and arrested many of the patrons. The Stonewall Riots are widely acknowledged as a major galvanizing force in the fight for gay rights in the United States. The figures placed in the park outside are a poignant tribute to the LGBTQ+ community, and the people who fought for acceptance and visibility.

Viewfinding

Viewfinding is a public art installation and queer poetry collaboration by Sarah E. Brook, a New York-based artist whose work utilizes “translucency, layering, color gradients and architectural references to investigate the relationship between expansive external and internal (psychic) space.” Located off the 68th Street Entrance to Riverside Park South, the interactive light sculpture is comprised of five wooden trapezoidal panels within which are strips of cast acrylic painted in colors from rich blue to fiery pink, all meant to reference the sky at sunset. Twenty-six poems by queer poets are attached to the bench below the panels. Through her art, Brook invites the viewer to explore “how vastness can dismantle limiting narratives of being” and “offers viewers the opportunity to seek their own resonant orientation to the work through chosen sightlines, alternately illuminating, obscuring and revealing corridors of visibility.”