The U.S. Has One LGBTQ National Monument, and It Took a Lot to Get There

from the Commercial Observer

“Literally nobody was addressing this history through landmark designations, or even just talking about how we were an important community that had its own history,” said Jay Shockley, a former senior historian for the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. He was another member of the small circle of historic preservationists who got the landmark conversation going, along with Gale Harris, Andrew Dolkart and Ken Lustbader.

It’s a little-known paradox in the recondite world of historic preservation that the National Register of Historic Places, which contains some 90,000 sites and is overseen by the National Park Service, plays almost no role in shaping the fate of these sites or protecting them from real estate interests (outside of a narrow set of rules that apply only to federally funded development projects like interstate highways).

“The National Register is important because it recognizes nationally important sites, but it doesn’t have any teeth at all,” Shockley said. “It’s an honorary listing. So properties on the National Register can be demolished.”

But for Shockley and his co-conspirators, the Stonewall Inn was a launching pad for the larger LGBTQ landmarking effort they went on to launch officially in 2015, calling it the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.

The group decided to take their moonshot in 1999 when there was momentum to nominate Stonewall to the National Register before the end of the Clinton administration, according to Shockley. There was just one problem: Private property owners wield veto power in the nomination process, and the Duell family was not on board.

Read the full article from the Commercial Observer.

Featured thumbnail photo by Spencer Platt / Getty Images.