20-site Greenwich Village walking tour conveys Stonewall uprising’s pivotal history
20170929
By: Tanay Warerkar
From Curbed.com
Earlier today, the National Parks Conservation Association launched a walking tour that’s dedicated to telling the story behind the 1969 Stonewall uprising and the subsequent fight for LGBTQ rights.
This self-guided walking tour will include 20 different stops near and around the Stonewall Inn (now a national monument), in the Greenwich Village area. In creating this walking tour, the NPCA partnered with NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project and built on their groundbreaking work identifying sites of historic importance to the LGBTQ community in the city.
“Stonewall isn’t just a building, it’s the birthplace of an important movement,” Cortney Worrall, the Northeast senior regional director for NPCA, said in a statement. “And the supporting role the surrounding neighborhood played in this movement can only fully be understood by walking the streets and reliving how the uprising unfolded. This is how we remember our painful past, and what keeps our country from repeating it.”
Stops on this tour include the former home of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop (the country’s first LGBTQ bookstore) on Christopher Street; Julius’ Bar, where the Mattachine Society held a “sip-in” to protest the State Liquor Authority’s policy of revoking licenses from bars that served lesbians and gay men; and the snake pit, a basement bar that too was raided less than a year after the Stonewall uprising.
“Our mission is to make the invisible history of New York City’s LGBT community, which can be felt throughout the city but particularly here in Greenwich Village, a visible and better understood facet of our city’s historical fabric,” Jay Shockley, co-director of the Historic Sites Project, said in a statement.