Stonewall Inn (New York, N.Y.)

The Stonewall Inn, often shortened to Stonewall, is a gay bar and recreational tavern in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City, and the site of the Stonewall riots of 1969, which is widely considered to be the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement and the modern fight for LGBT rights in the United States.[2]

The original Inn, which operated between 1967 and 1969, was located at 51–53 Christopher Street, between Seventh Avenue South and Waverly Place.[4] In 1930, the Stonewall Inn, sometimes known as Bonnie's Stonewall Inn, presumably in honor of its proprietor, Vincent Bonavia, opened at 91 Seventh Avenue South. Purportedly a tearoom, a restaurant serving light meals and non-alcoholic beverages, it was in fact a speakeasy, which was raided by prohibition agents in December 1930, along with several other Village nightspots.[13] In 1966, three members of the Mafia invested in the Stonewall Inn, turning it into a gay bar. It had previously been a restaurant and a nightclub for heterosexuals. The Stonewall uprising was a series of spontaneous, violent protests by members of the gay community against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. In late 1969, a few months after the uprising, the Stonewall Inn closed.

The Stonewall Inn opened its doors as a gay bar in 1967 in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan. The Inn’s initial clientele were mostly white gay men, but by 1969 it catered to people from all walks of life. Puerto Rican and African American gay men, drag queens, and queer youth, many of whom were kicked out of or ran away from their homes, found solidarity at Stonewall. On June 24, 1969, the Public Morals squad of Manhattan’s First Police Division raided the Stonewall Inn. On June 28 at approximately 1:15 a.m., undercover NYPD officers raided Stonewall. Countless people “resisted the police by refusing to show identification or go into a bathroom so that a police officer could verify their sex.” Arrested folks were cheered on by crowds shouting “Gay Power!” and “We Want Freedom!” as a means of protest.

As the police arrested employees and patrons, the crowd’s angry chants turned into physical resistance. The famous African American transgender activist Marsha P. Johnson is credited as a leader of the Stonewall riots, and firsthand accounts report protesters throwing objects like pennies and beer cans in frustration at the cops. Stonewall rioters’ fight against discrimination inspired LGBTQ+ communities across the country to organize and protest. Gay rights activist Franklin Kameny recalled, “by the time of Stonewall, we had fifty to sixty gay groups in the country. A year later there was at least fifteen hundred.” Stonewall led to the creation of such groups like the Gay Activists Alliance, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), and the Gay Liberation Front. The National Park Service later recognized the area’s historic importance and listed it on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. Just one year later, the area surrounding the Stonewall Inn was named a National Historic Landmark—the first landmark added for its significance to LGBTQ+ history.