PAST EVENT

Walking in LGBTQ Footsteps in the Upper West Side

June 4, 2019 | 6:00pm-7:00pm

New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West, New York
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New York Historical Society

EVENT DETAILS

Join the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project as they reveal the hidden history of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Starting at the New-York Historical Society and ending in Central Park, journey through the neighborhood to uncover the history of sites you never knew through the lives, residences, and nightlife venues of LGBTQ leaders, activists, and thinkers.

Space is limited.

This program is presented in partnership with the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.

LOCATION

New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024 & Central Park

PURCHASING TICKETS

By phone: Contact New-York Historical’s in-house call center at (212) 485-9268. Call center is open 9 am–5 pm daily.
Online: Click on the orange “Buy Tickets” button at the top of this page.
In person: Advance tickets may be purchased on site at New-York Historical’s Admissions desk during museum hours.

Advance purchase is required to guarantee participation. Program tickets include Museum Admission. Promotional support for this event provided, in part, by the generous support of American Express, Con Edison, and the NYC & Company Foundation.

PAST EVENT

Brooklyn LGBTQ+ History

March 28, 2019 | 7:00pm-8:00pm

Brooklyn Community Pride Center
1360 Fulton Street, Ground Floor, Brooklyn
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The LGBTQ+ community has a long and vibrant history that predates the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, a key turning point in the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement in the United States. Project co-directors Jay Shockley and Ken Lustbader will share the history of sites in Brooklyn associated with LGBTQ+ culture and history from the 19th century to the year 2000. Using contemporary and archival images, attendees will gain a richer understanding of Brooklyn’s LGBTQ+ heritage, including such sites as Walt Whitman’s residence, Green-Wood Cemetery, Starlite Lounge, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and Transy House.

Open to the public.

This event is part of the BKLYN LGBTQ+ History Series.  To help celebrate WorldPride NYC and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, Brooklyn Community Pride Center is hosting a three-month series of book readings, talks, discussions, movie screenings, and other events to highlight the history of the LGBTQ+ community, especially as it happened in Brooklyn.

PAST EVENT

Stonewall 50: Defining LGBTQ Site Preservation, at Columbia’s Earl Hall

April 6, 2019 | 1:00pm-5:00pm

Earl Hall (Columbia)
2980 Broadway, New York, NY 10027
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STONEWALL 50: DEFINING LGBTQ SITE PRESERVATION

A symposium on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots co-presented by Columbia GSAPP, the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project and QSAPP

April 6, 2019
Columbia University, Avery Hall, Wood Auditorium
1:00pm-5:00pm
The day will begin with a walking tour of Greenwich Village,
meeting at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street at 10:00am
FREE and open to the public (advance RSVP required)

 

Coliumbia GSAPP Stonewall symposium

A key principle of historic preservation is the power of places; a conviction that extant places matter and that they can inform current generations about the lives of people and events of the past.

For over one hundred years, professional preservationists and local citizens around the world have advocated for the preservation of architectural monuments and places where famous people lived or where momentous events occurred.

In recent years, the focus of preservation has expanded to include more diverse buildings, people, and stories. But the preservation of sites of importance to the LGBTQ communities has lagged until recently. It was not until 1999 that the first LGBTQ site, Stonewall, was listed on the National Register. In North America and parts of Europe activists have been engaged in identification and interpretation or reinterpretation of LGBTQ sites, but this has been a slow process and in many parts of the world, where LGBTQ rights are suppressed, such examination would still be an impossibility. This symposium examines the progress and challenges of preserving sites of significance to LGBTQ communities and, by extension, to the heritage of cities and nations around the world.

The symposium, located at Earl Hall on Columbia’s Morningside Heights Campus from 1:00-5:00 PM is preceded by walking tours hosted by NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project beginning at Christopher Park (adjacent to Stonewall Inn) at 10:00 AM and is followed by the dedication of Earl Hall’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places by Ann Kansfield (CC ‘98) and a celebratory reception at 5:30 PM. RSVP is available for each of portion of the event here.

 

Symposium Schedule

  • Introduction by Andrew Dolkart (MSHP ‘77), Professor of Historic Preservation, Columbia GSAPP, Co-Director, NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project
  • Recognizing LGBTQ Sites in the United States
    Moderated by Amanda Davis (MSHP ’06), NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project
    Cate Fosl, Director, Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research, University of Louisville
    Nick Large, GLBT Historical Society, Board of Directors, San Francisco
    Shayne Watson, Architectural Historian & Preservation Planner, Watson Heritage Consulting, San Francisco
  • LGBTQ Site Preservation: An International Perspective
    Moderated by Ken Lustbader (MSHP ’93), Co-Director, NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project
    Ankit Bhuptani, Gay & Lesbian Vaishnava Association, Mumbai
    Matt Cook, Professor of Modern History, University of London
    Michael Ighodaro, Assistant Professor of Global LGBTI Studies, The New School, New York
  • Reinterpreting the House Museum
    Moderated by Jay Shockley (MSHP NG ’80), Co-Director, NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project
    Susan Ferentinos, Public History Researcher, Bloomington
    Barbara Lau, Executive Director, Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, Durham
    Ken Turino, Manager of Community Engagement and Exhibitions, Historic New England

Free and open to the public with RSVP

Co-Organized by NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, QSAPP and the Office of the University Chaplain as part of the Stonewall 50 Consortium.

 

Image: The sign reading “Queer Symposium” on the lap of Alma Mater created by QSAPP students on February 208th, 2019 references an image on the cover of the first edition of Pride of Lions: The Newspaper of the Gay People at Columbia in April 1972. Where a sign read “Gay Dance” and pointed to Earl Hall, the location of meetings and dances of the first ever university sanctioned LGBT student group, the Student Homophile League, founded in 1966, which still exists as the Columbia Queer Alliance.

PAST EVENT

Gay Green-Wood

June 16, 2019 | 3:30pm-5:30pm

The Green-Wood Cemetery
500 25th Street, Brooklyn, NY
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The Project joins with The Green-Wood Cemetery to celebrate Pride Month with a special trolley tour illuminating permanent residents who have made a lasting impact on American history and culture. Visit the graves of important LGBT figures including “It’s Raining Men” co-writer, Paul Jabara; sculptor of Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain, Emma Stebbins; activists and founders of the Hetrick Martin Institute, Drs. Emery Hetrick and Damien Martin, among others. This trolley tour is led by Andrew Dolkart and Ken Lustbader, co-directors of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.

Advance registration must be made through The Green-Wood Cemetery.

Promotional support for this event provided, in part, by the generous support of American Express, Con Edison, and the NYC & Company Foundation.

PAST EVENT

Stonewall 50 | Place, Community, and LGBT History

June 12, 2019 | 6:30pm-7:30pm

Martin House
125 Jewett Parkway, Buffalo, NY 14214
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NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project project manager Amanda Davis - photoThe historic uprising at the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar, took place fifty years ago this June and is considered a key turning point in the LGBT rights movement. However, long before the summer of 1969, LGBT people were leaving their mark on New York City and America. At this talk, Amanda Davis, project manager of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, will discuss the importance of place in connecting and providing refuge for a marginalized LGBT community. She will also highlight the Project’s collaboration with the house museum staff of the Alice Austen House, the pioneering early 20th century photographer’s residence, to reinterpret its historical narrative and acknowledge the life of Austen’s same-sex partner.

Amanda Davis has overseen the LGBT Historic Sites Project’s documentation initiatives since its founding in 2015. In 2018, she was named to the National Trust’s inaugural “40 Under 40: People Saving Places” list, in recognition of her efforts to help tell America’s full history. She holds a BA in Architectural History from the University of Virginia and an MS in Historic Preservation from Columbia University.

$10 | Free for Martin House Members

Reservations required. Reserve your space today.

DESIGN ALOUD is a series of conversations, screenings, and performances exploring the power of contemporary design in harmony with nature. This series is generously sponsored by Bob Skerker.

Promotional support for this event provided, in part, by the generous support of American Express, Con Edison, and the NYC & Company Foundation.

 

Taking LGBT history into the classroom

March 5, 2019

In 2018, the Project was awarded a grant from the City Council to collaborate with the Department of Education in bringing LGBT place-based history to public schools in the city’s five boroughs.

From over 100 educator-submitted requests, our February to May 2019 schedule of sessions was narrowed down to twenty. Our collaboration is the first of its kind: connecting middle and high school students with historic places in their city — and even in their own neighborhoods — that reflect the LGBT community’s contributions to New York and American history and culture.

Working with education consultant Melissa Mott, we’ve so far visited five classrooms, from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, to the south shore of Staten Island and the Fordham section of the Bronx. Grounded in a discussion about the erasure and/or misrepresentation of many diverse histories, the visits provide students of all backgrounds with the opportunity to rethink how they see or don’t see themselves or their classmates reflected in the telling of American history. Our lessons also seek to position LGBT youth in the center of their own stories by reinterpreting historic locations, events, and people to highlight previously invisible LGBT narratives.

The feedback we’ve received so far from NYC educators has been wonderful:

I was delighted to have the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project visit my classroom. Their presentation was interactive, student-driven, and dynamic; it asked students both to engage with new material related to NYC history, and to re-contextualize some material they were already familiar with. For example, many students have read Langston Hughes in middle or high school, often in the context of reading Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun; but my twelfth-grade English students were audibly shocked to hear that both were members of the LGBT community, and further, that they could visit the actual sites where both writers lived and worked in New York City. The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project’s place-based history creates a new sense of relevance for students who may be prone to look at history as already written or as a simple case of “this is what happened”; the NYC LGBT Historic Sites project reframes history as a narrative written by a dominant culture, and as part of an ongoing struggle for recognition and civil rights taking place right now, right here.

– Katherine Montgomery, Phd; English teacher at TAPCO (Bronx)Shown here, Project co-director Ken Lustbader and education consultant Melissa Mott travel to Staten Island to share LGBT history with public school students.

 

   

   

 

PAST EVENT

“Stonewall 50” Tour of Greenwich Village, with the Municipal Art Society

April 14, 2019 | 2:00pm-4:00pm

Greenwich Village

]In celebration of “Stonewall 50” — a year-long commemoration of the landmark 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn — join co-director Ken Lustbader and project manager Amanda Davis for a walking tour of Greenwich Village. Learn about key places and people of the pre- and post-Stonewall LGBT civil rights movement and their lasting impact on American culture. The tour will also highlight the importance of these sites to a marginalized community that oftentimes had nowhere else to go to fully be themselves. Stops will include places connected to such groups as the Mattachine Society, Gay Liberation Front, and Salsa Soul Sisters, and to LGBT activists, artists, and business owners who found refuge in the Village.

Hosted in partnership with the Municipal Art Society.

Photos: George Segal’s sculpture “Gay Liberation” in Christopher Park, 2016. 

PAST EVENT

Gay by Design, with the New York School of Interior Design

April 10, 2019 | 6:00pm-8:00pm

New York School of Interior Design, Arthur Satz Auditorium
170 East 70th Street, Manhattan
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The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project is delighted to be hosted by the New York School of Interior Design for a discussion of LGBT historic sites of the design communities. From the 17th century to the year 2000, sites – such as former residences of LGBT notables, bars and clubs, educational and cultural institutions, works of public art and architecture, activism locations, and performing arts venues – illustrate the richness of the city’s LGBT history and the community’s influence on American culture.

Photos: Elsie de Wolfe, often credited as America’s first professional interior designer, in ball costume, 1905. Photo by Byron Co. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

 

PAST EVENT

Woodlawn LGBT History Trolley Tour

April 7, 2019 | 2:00pm-4:00pm

Woodlawn Cemetery
Jerome Avenue At Bainbridge Avenue
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Woodlawn LGBT History Trolley Tour

Woodlawn Cemetery and the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project celebrate the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, a key turning point in the LGBT civil rights movement, with a special trolley tour illuminating LGBT permanent residents who have made a lasting impact on American culture in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Join us as we share stories about love, loss, and relationships on our first LGBT tour.  Historian Andrew Dolkart will take us to the final resting places of Harlem Renaissance poet  Countee Cullen, illustrator Joseph Leyendecker,  theatrical agent Elisabeth Marbury, and photographer George Platt Lynes.  Patricia Cronin’s well known sculpture “Memorial to a Marriage” is a highlight on this tour.

The tour will be co-led by Andrew Dolkart and Ken Lustbader, Co-Directors of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, and Susan Olsen, Director of Historical Services at Woodlawn Cemetery.

The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project is a cultural heritage initiative and educational resource that is documenting existing LGBT historic sites throughout New York City from the 17th century to the year 2000.

We will be meeting at the Jerome Avenue and Bainbridge Avenue gate at 1:45 PM and the Trolley Tour will begin at 2:00 PM.

We anticipate this tour selling out quickly so tickets must be purchased in advance.

Tour is rain or shine.  Ticket sales are final.  Refunds will not be issued.

We are located directly across the street from the Woodlawn stop on the IRT #4 subway.

Free parking available in Woodlawn Cemetery.

We look forward to hosting you.

 

With Bum Bum Bar Closed, Only Three Lesbian Bars Remain in New York City

March 1, 2019

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PRESS CONTACT
Ken Lustbader, NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project
p: (917) 848-1776 / e: [email protected]

 

With Bum Bum Bar Closed, Only Three Lesbian Bars Remain in New York City

Just three lesbian bars remain in operation in New York City

 

New York, NY—Friday, March 1, 2019—After more than two decades, the Bum Bum Bar in Woodside, Queens, has shuttered. Since its opening in the early 1990s, the Bum Bum Bar (pronounced “boom boom”) has been gay-owned and operated, attracting a mixed, but mostly working-class, Latina lesbian crowd.

Along with several other gay and lesbian bars in Queens, Bum Bum provided support for the inaugural Queens Pride Parade in 1993. (more) Bum Bum was known for hosting numerous events that attracted customers from across the five boroughs and was one of only four lesbian bars still in operation in New York City. With Bum Bum’s closing (at the end of 2018), the three remaining NYC lesbian bars are Henrietta Hudson and Cubbyhole, both in Greenwich Village, and Ginger’s Bar in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

While their significance is often underestimated or dismissed by heterosexual society, bars and other establishments play a pivotal role is LGBT culture as centers for LGBT acceptance, community and activism. Through history, these spaces — whether always gay friendly or only during certain times of the day or week — have given LGBT people the freedom to be themselves in a way they often cannot be in their personal or professional lives. “These are the kinds of historic places – dating from the city’s founding in the 17th century to the year 2000 – that we are continuously documenting,” said Amanda Davis, manager of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, “so that our project reflects the diversity of the LGBT community throughout the five boroughs.”

Other significant LGBT bars and nightlife venues in Queens include The Love Boat (more; no longer active) and Friend’s Tavern, known as the oldest active gay bar in Queens. (more) Both have been documented by the Project as historic sites.

Exterior of the now-shuttered Bum Bum Bar, at 63-14 Roosevelt Avenue, Woodside, Queens. Photo by Christopher Brazee for the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. About the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project

The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project is a cultural initiative and educational resource that is documenting historic sites connected to the LGBT community throughout New York City. Its interactive map features diverse places from the 17th century to the year 2000 that are important to LGBT history and illustrate the community’s influence on American culture. The Project is nominating sites to the National Register of Historic Places and developing educational tours and programs.

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