Tour New York’s LGBTQ+ historic sites through this 3D experience

It’s a “powerful tool for anyone, anywhere in the world, to connect viscerally to the sites.”

There’s a new way to get perspective this Pride—a 3D tour of New York’s LGBTQ+ landmarks, from the Stonewall Inn to Christopher Park.

2020 has presented us with some challenges, but it’s nothing the LGBTQ+ community can’t handle. The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project and the non-profit archiver CyArk teamed up to create the 3D tour so that New Yorkers and people around the world can still commemorate and get a deeper understanding of LGBTQ+ history this month and beyond.

The new tour, which you can access here, uses high-resolution 3D models, captured by CyArk using photogrammetry and LIDAR. Ken Lustbader, co-founder of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites project, narrates the tour that covers nine different locations that illuminate the events of the history-making 1969 Stonewall uprising and the activism that followed.

“This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, NYC’s first-ever Pride march,” Lustbader said. “Unfortunately, the realities of 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic prohibit our LGBTQ community from gathering in large numbers to celebrate. The 3D model created by CyArk, paired with our historic narrative, is a powerful tool for anyone, anywhere in the world, to connect viscerally to the sites that represent our history.”

Tourists can actually go inside the Stonewall Inn, for example, and pan around, to learn about the famous bar, which was at first a mafia-owned gay bar that had bouncers and a fee to get in. While inside, we learn exactly where the riots began, and what the bar looked like during that time. (It was bigger with a full dance floor in one space and the bar in the next.)

See it for yourself at cyark.org/projects/stonewall-national-monument.