On June 28, 1969, rebellious queer bar patrons fought back against a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s West Village. The uprising wasn’t the first step in the movement toward queer liberation, but it certainly ignited the flame. The bar went out of business shortly after the riots, and the property was divided in two. In the 1990s, the 53 Christopher Street side of the bar was rebooted as a new Stonewall Inn; but the 51 Christopher Street side had seen a varied evolution. It was a bagel shop, a nail salon, a clothing store, and a gay bar. Now it has been reenvisioned as a visitor center that sits across the street from the Stonewall National Monument.
In 2020, Pride Live cofounders Diana Rodriguez and Ann Marie Gothard purchased the space, with the aim of establishing a public commemoration of queer history. They wanted to build a museum-like visitor center to look back at decades of LGBTQ+ activism. In partnership with the National Park Service, the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center now offers people a chance to view queer history through the lens of art, photography, and tech.
A new era for the Stonewall Inn
The visitor center features a stark design. With sleek tile and bright lights, the space verges on Silicon Valley-style modernism. Gothard says the all-white design brightens up the center, which is devoid of natural light, and provides a blank canvas that designers could “infuse with color through the stories and the exhibit.”
Stretched across the gallery’s main wall is a timeline that tells the story of LGBTQ+ activism. Brought to life by experience design studio Local Projects, the timeline chronicles the movement toward queer liberation from pre-Stonewall to present day. Local Projects had originally planned for the timeline to jut out from the wall in a series of rainbow banners, but the plan was scrapped for something simpler.
“Wanting to keep everything feeling open and clear, we moved [the timeline] up against the wall,” says Stephen Baker, creative director for Local Projects. “What remained is a stripe for each color of the flag, and the black background representing the interior of Stonewall during the late 1960s.”
The space also includes several homages to the original Stonewall Inn. The Pride Live team sourced the fully functional jukebox model present at the original bar, filling it with songs that may have been heard back in the ’60s.
Who are the stewards of queer history?
Adjacent to the sprawling timeline wall is the outline of a door. Now bricked over, the frame originally connected this building to the adjoining 53 Christopher Street, creating one continuous Stonewall Inn. On the other side of the door frame now is the bar—Gothard says she’s friends with the owners, though they remain independent. For Gothard, the visitor center provides broader access to queer history than the bar can.
“If you stand outside, you see families, parents with their children, and their parents are explaining what this bar means, but they can’t go inside,” Gothard says. “Now that we have this, it’s an opportunity for families to share what adults share when they go into the bar.”
Still, the walled-off doorway begs the question: Who should be telling our history? The visitor center frames queer history as a public good. It is, after all, a space where park rangers for the monument across the street can dump their personal items and stamp visitors’ passports. The bar next door argues that queer history is a more private matter, collected and shared by queer people over vodka sodas and Donna Summer tracks.
This question becomes even more apparent as visitors reach the back of the center, which shows a variety of golden shovels sporting the names of corporate sponsors. There’s Amazon, which helped source the jukebox, and Google, which built an “activation” wall that functions more as a smattering of decontextualized photos. And what’s a Pride event without a bank sponsorship? For that, there’s a J.P. Morgan Chase shovel.
The list of individual sponsors is even more striking: Madonna, Chelsea Clinton, and Ellen DeGeneres pepper the celebrity register. Those golden shovels aren’t just on display—they take up about a third of the exhibit. The Stonewall Visitor Center, with each and every corporate partner emblazoned across the exhibition, removes all the grime from queer history. It makes Stonewall a sanitary, consumable story.
The importance of access
No matter how corporate the center feels, it still provides crucial access to queer history. That goes down to the details. EDG, one of the architecture firms on the project, spent months gaining permission to lower the stoop outside, making it ADA accessible. Gothard speaks excitedly about hosting school trips and panels.
As the faces of the queer liberation movement grow old, that access becomes even more important. Robert Vinci, project director for Local Projects, describes his joy in seeing some of the original Stonewall activists organizing in the space. This includes Mark Segal, the longtime activist who helped create the space and is quoted in the entrance.
“As a gay man who produces museum exhibitions, working on a project at Stonewall is an opportunity that I never imagined,” Vinci says. “To receive an opportunity to bring the important details of Stonewall to visitors from around the world at the location where it happened, and to work with someone who was there in 1969, is an honor. Everyone needs to know this story.”