Take a Discovery Walk to Celebrate Pride Month

As part of NYRR's celebration of LGBTQ Pride Month, NYRR Striders coach Ruth Gursky created a 1.5-mile virtual discovery walk through NYC's West Village. The walk highlights the significance of locations in the history of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

Check out a video of the tour below!

Want to take the tour yourself? You can access the route here and head out for your walk during Pride Month—or anytime!

Stonewall National Monument/Christopher Park

Located across from the Stonewall Inn, Christopher Park has been at the center of the LGBT rights movement since the historic 1969 Stonewall uprising. Before the uprising, the park was a favorite hangout for a diverse group of gay street youth—often homeless—and those who might identify today as transgender.

In 1979, New York City announced that a commemorative statue by sculptor George Segal would be placed in Christopher Park. After years of controversy, Segal’s 1980 Gay Liberation sculpture, pictured below, was installed in 1992. In 1999, Christopher Park was included as part of the Stonewall Inn’s nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. After a multi-year effort by local advocates, in 2016 President Barack Obama designated Stonewall National Monument, which encompasses Christopher Park.

The park includes the Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth Flagpole, named for the first officer killed during the Civil War, Union Army Col. Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth. In 2017, a rainbow LGBT flag was raised on the monument, making it the first officially maintained LGBT flag at a federal monument.

Stonewall Inn

In the early morning of Saturday, June 28, 1969, dozens of gay men, lesbians, and transgendered people, many of them people of color, resisted a routine police raid on the Stonewall Inn. The protests that followed over the next three days, with crowds peaking in the thousands, are considered the single most important event leading to the modern gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights movement in the United States.

Stonewall Inn was the first site listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its connection to LGBT history, in 1999. Stonewall Inn was landmarked by the City of New York in 2015, the first site ever designated based on LGBT history, and was named a U.S. National Monument, the first in the country dedicated to the LGBT rights movement, on June 24, 2016.

Julius’ Bar

In the mid-1960s the gay rights movement was picking up speed, building on the momentum of the anti-war, civil rights, and women’s movements. Members of the Mattachine Society, an organization of gay activists, decided to challenge a law prohibiting bars from serving alcohol to “deviants,” which included homosexuals. They decided to stage a “sip-in” (a tip of the hat to the anti-segregation protests at lunch counters). They received either hostility or disbelief from bartenders (one told them they were too well dressed to be gay), including at Julius', but in 1972 the actions led to the overturning of the law prohibiting serving alcohol to homosexuals.

NYC AIDS Memorial Park at St. Vincent's Triangle

This memorial features an 18-foot white triangular steel canopy, central granite water fountain, and benches. Renowned visual artist Jenny Holzer chose and positioned passages from “Songs of Myself,” poet Walt Whitman’s celebration of hope, unity, and human dignity, which are engraved in the memorial’s granite pavement. The memorial is a place of contemplation and provides a shelter for reflection and remembrance of the men, women, and children lost to AIDS. St. Vincent’s Medical Center used to be located nearby on 7th Avenue; it had the nation’s first AIDS unit and was a leader in AIDS research and treatment.

LGBT Community Center

The LGBT Community Center has been a home and resource hub for the LGBT community in New York City since its founding in 1983. The building that houses the center is a beautiful brick Italianate structure built as a public school in the late 19th century and sold to the Lesbian & Gay Services Center, Inc. in 1983. Today, it has grown to become the largest LGBT multi-service organization on the East coast and the second largest in the world. Other organizations that have been located here include SAGE (Senior Action in a Gay Environment), the Metropolitan Community Church (a LGBT congregation), the AIDS activist group ACT UP, and GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation).

Church of the Village/Site of First PFLAG Meeting

The first meeting of what became the organization now known as Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), took place in 1973 at what is now known as the Church of the Village, on 13th Street and 7th Avenue. In June 1972, Jeanne Manford, a Queens schoolteacher, marched in the Christopher Street Liberation March, the precursor of today’s LGBT Pride Parade, with her gay son Morty to show support for her child. So many people came up to Jeanne and asked her to speak to their parents that she decided to hold a meeting for parents struggling with accepting and supporting their gay children. That meeting took place on March 26, 1973, and eventually led to the founding of PFLAG, which now has 400 chapters nationally and 200,000 members, and provides resources and support to the families of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and lobbies for greater understanding and equal treatment of LGBT people.

A 2013 plaque on the front of the church commemorates the first meeting and PFLAG’s founding.

LGBTQ Memorial

New York City’s first official memorial dedicated to the LGBTQ community opened in 2018 and honors “the LGBT community, those lost in the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting in June 2016, and all victims of hate, intolerance and violence.” It is located on the waterfront between West 12th Street and Bethune Street. Designed by Brooklyn artist Anthony Goicolea, the memorial comprises nine large boulders in a circular pattern, six of them are bisected and then bonded with glass. Traditionally delicate and fragile, the glass here it is used to make the boulders stronger and for its refractive qualities—the rainbow is an LGBTQ icon, and when light hits the glass it projects subtle, colorful patterns.

Greenwich Village Waterfront at Christopher Street Pier

The Greenwich Village waterfront has been a safe haven for a marginalized queer community. Between 1971 and 1983 the vast interiors and offices of the piers’ decaying terminals housed a diverse range of artistic work, including site-based installations, photography, murals, and performances by Vito Acconci, Peter Hujar, Gordon Matta-Clark, Selly Seccombe, Tava, Arthur Tress, and David Wojnarowicz. The AIDS epidemic and planning for waterfront improvements began to impact the area, and by the time the Christopher Street Pier terminal was demolished in the mid-1980s, it had become a first or second home for many marginalized queer youth of color, who to this day make up a significant percentage of the homeless youth population in New York City.

In the early 1990s, planning was underway for rebuilding the waterfront, including the Christopher Street Pier. The initial planning process did not address the presence and needs of the queer community, which catalyzed a grassroots effort. The battle for LGBT representation in the planning process helped lead to the founding of the Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment (FIERCE) in 2000 by a group of primarily LGBTQ youth of color.

Closed in 2001, the pier reopened in 2003 as part of the renovation of the Greenwich Village waterfront. FIERCE has become a force helping local queer youth advocate for later hours and better social services. The waterfront and piers remain important public spaces for LGBT people, especially queer youth/young adults of color.