For more than two years, the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project has been compiling locations connected to the city’s queer history from the 17th century to the 21st century.
Now the group’s findings are available on a free interactive map.
Funded in part by a National Park Service grant, the project was inspired by the lack of visibility for LGBT history on the National Register of Historic Places—an oversight the NPS itself is working to address. The map includes more than 550 locations across the city and can filtered into categories like the era, neighborhood, type of space (bars, homes, performance venues), and cultural significance (activism, cruising, people of color).
Notable venues include the homes of Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, and Lorraine Hansbury; Keith Haring’s studio and Staten Island’s Alice Austen House, where the noted photographer lived with her longtime companion, kindergarten teacher Gertrude Tate, for more than 30 years.
Some spots are less obvious than others: Angel of the Waters, the statue at Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace, was chosen because it was sculpted by Emma Stebbins, who was part of a group of lesbian artists known as “the female jolly bachelors.”
Ken Lustbader began mapping sites more than 20 years ago and, once he secured funding, brought on Columbia architectural history professor Andrew Dolkart and historian Jay Shockley. They poured through collections at the New York Public Library, uncovered hidden facets of the city’s history—like the street corner in Jackson Heights where the murder of a Julio Rivera, a gay man, led to the first hate-crime trial in the United States.
“We’re talking about LGBT history, which is often covert, hidden, transitory, dismissed,” Lustbader told DNAInfo. “We’re talking about very diverse sites. It’s not just self-referential. It’s showing that LGBT history is American history.”
Lustbader’s team recently received a $100,000 grant from New York Community Trust to expand on their work, and hopefully add walking tours, podcasts, video and other components. “[The project] shows so much of the contributions of LGBT members have made to the society at large,” said a trust spokesperson. “If history is written by the victors, and no one writes your history, you remain invisible.”
Although most of the locations are in Greenwich Village, Midtown or the West Village, the team wants to cover all five boroughs: Last June, they placed rainbow flags at the graves of composer Leonard Bernstein in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery and poet Countee Cullen in the Bronx’s Woodlawn Cemetery.
You can submit historic locations on the NYC LGBT Sites Project website.