NEW SITES PUBLISHED: Over 500 Extant Sites Across the 5 Boroughs

Our dynamic website features places where LGBTQ people made history, from college campuses on Staten Island to venues for supporting community in Brooklyn, to public parks in The Bronx, to storied sports venues in Queens. And in Manhattan, our team has added six new sites which expand the telling of LGBTQ place-based history.

Murder Location of Amanda Milan & March Against Anti-Trans Violence
Eighth Avenue & West 41st Street
Manhattan

In June of 2000, Amanda Milan, a trans sex worker, was attacked and murdered outside of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, near Times Square, by three men using transphobic hate speech. The Memorial for Amanda Milan and the March Against Anti-Trans Violence was organized a month later by her friends and family with the help of Sylvia Rivera, which led to the revival of the activist group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). (read more)

Agosto Machado Residence
54 East 4th Street
Manhattan

Downtown Manhattan performance artist, activist, and “street queen” Agosto Machado lived in an apartment in this East Village tenement building from 1970/71 to 1996/97. While here, as he lost many friends to the AIDS epidemic, he began creating altars and shrines in their memories. (read more)

Mantel in Agosto Machado’s 4th Street apartment (obituary clippings, religious objects, and other ephemera). Courtesy of Gordon Robichaux.

Albert Sprague Bard Office
25 Broad Street
Manhattan

The legal basis for New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission was the Bard Act, passed by the New York State Legislature in 1956 following several decades of lobbying by Albert Sprague Bard. Bard’s career, mainly focused on New York City, was dedicated to the beautification of the environment, and he maintained an office at the Broad-Exchange Building from its opening in 1902 until his death in 1963. (read more)

Reinaldo Arenas Residence
328 West 44th Street
Manhattan

Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban novelist and poet known for his highly homoerotic work, through which he starkly criticized and denounced the Cuban Revolution and regime. Best known posthumously in the United States for Before Night Falls (both the autobiography and film), Arenas developed most of his oeuvre in his sixth-floor apartment in this building in Hell’s Kitchen, where he lived from 1983 until his death in 1990. (read more)

Paul Cadmus & Jared French Residence & Studio
5 St. Lukes Place, Manhattan

In 1935, the top floor of this Greenwich Village rowhouse became the home and studio of two of America’s most important mid-20th-century artists, Paul Cadmus and Jared French, both of whom frequently employed gay or homo-erotic imagery. It remained Cadmus’s home and studio through the 1950s and was where many of his major paintings were completed. (read more)

SILENCE = DEATH Collective at Jorge Socarrás Residence
508 East 5th Street
Manhattan

Here, a political collective of six gay artists finalized its now-iconic Silence = Death poster, featuring the pink triangle, which they designed in response to the AIDS epidemic. The Silence = Death collective, as they became known, ultimately gave permission to ACT UP to use the poster in its demonstrations and outreach, making the design one of the most influential works of protest art in American history. (read more)

“Greenwich Village Cafeteria,” by Paul Cadmus, 1934. In the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and representing the real-life Stewart’s Cafeteria in Greenwich Village.

BONUS: New Historic Site in Queens Mapped & Published!

Queens Pride House at Queens Borough Hall
120-55 Queens Boulevard
Queens

From its inception in 1997 to May 2001, Queens Pride House had meeting and office space in Queens Borough Hall, where members organized events, coordinated legal and health services, and provided a gathering space for the Queens LGBTQ community. Queens Pride House has been a staple community space for LGBTQ people in Queens and still operates in Jackson Heights, where it has been located since 2004. (read more)