The Stonewall Inn becomes an official city landmark
In 2015, the Stonewall Inn in New York becomes an official city landmark: the first building ever to be honoured for its LGBTQ history.
On 23 June 2015, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission voted unanimously to designate the Stonewall Inn at 51–53 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village an official city landmark. It was the first time in New York's history that a building had been given this status primarily because of its significance to LGBTQ history.
The Stonewall Inn is no ordinary bar. On the night of 27 to 28 June 1969, the police raided it, which was common practice in New York's gay bars at the time. But this time the patrons fought back. What followed were days of protests and street fighting that went down in history as the Stonewall uprising and are widely regarded as the birth of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. Within a few months, numerous activist organisations had sprung up in direct response to Stonewall, and a year later the first Gay Pride marches took place in New York and other cities.
Although the building was already part of the Greenwich Village Historic District and had been under federal protection as a National Historic Landmark since 2000, it lacked individual landmark status from the City of New York until 2015. On the occasion of the vote, the chair of the Landmarks Commission, Meenakshi Srinivasan, described the Stonewall Inn as a symbol of a time when LGBTQ New Yorkers had decided to stop living in hiding. The then Public Advocate, Letitia James, compared the site to Selma for the African American civil rights movement and to Seneca Falls for the women's rights movement.
The vote took place a few days before the 46th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. And there was more to come: a year later, on 24 June 2016, President Barack Obama declared the area around the Stonewall Inn the first US national monument dedicated to the history and rights of LGBTQ people. Today the Stonewall Inn, which has long since become a place of pilgrimage for queer people from all over the world, enjoys several layers of protection and is one of the best-known queer landmarks in the world.