Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center set to open honoring historic LGBTQ uprising
The Stonewall Visitor Center will be located at the same site of the June 1969 uprising that is largely credited as a turning point in the modern gay rights movement.
Fifty-five years after an uprising gridlocked the streets of downtown Manhattan and catapulted the modern gay rights movement, a visitor center dedicated to the now-historic riots will open its doors next Friday.
The Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center will be located in the building next door to the Stonewall Inn, the site of the June 1969 Stonewall riots, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village neighborhood. The original bar included the current bar’s space and the site of the new visitor center, connected through an interior passageway that has since been sealed closed.
Its opening on the last weekend of June also coincides with the same weekend that the riots occurred in 1969. Around the world, LGBTQ Pride Month is celebrated in June in commemoration of the uprising.
Concept art showing the exterior view of the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center.Pride Live“My hopes are that people come to visit the space and that they understand where they are first and foremost, that they understand the significance of the space, that they understand they are standing where history took place,” said Diana Rodriguez, the co-founder and chief executive of Pride Live, the LGBTQ advocacy group that spearheaded and will manage the center. “Secondly, that they put their phones down and really experience it.”
The center will feature an art exhibition largely curated by Mark Segal, an LGBTQ activist who took part in the 1969 uprising. It will include replicas of the original bar’s jukebox and a rotating exhibition by LGBTQ youths and allies in conjunction with the Parsons School of Design.
Rating: 5