Walking Tour: LGBTQ History in Chelsea

Join our Executive Director Amanda Davis, and Director and co-Founder Ken Lustbader, for an exclusive walking tour of Chelsea with AIANY LGBTQIA+ Alliance.

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For LGBTQ people in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Chelsea emerged as an affordable yet still-centrally located alternative to neighboring Greenwich Village. In fact, over the next two decades, Chelsea gradually overtook the Village as the city’s gay hub. Influential artists, from composer Virgil Thomson to poet Assotto Saint and photographer Tseng Kwong Chi, called Chelsea home. By the 1990s, gay-owned venues like the Big Cup and Barracuda were located on and around Eighth Avenue. The neighborhood also played a key role in LGBTQ rights and AIDS activism, as seen at sites connected to Lesbian Feminist Liberation, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, pioneering openly transgender psychiatrist Dr. Jeanne Hoff, bouncer and activist Stormé DeLarverie, and activist and film historian Vito Russo.

The tour will also feature the Project’s new research about the iconic Hotel Chelsea, bringing to light its rich LGBTQ history and expanding how it is interpreted today.

This 90-minute walking tour will begin in front of the Hotel Chelsea, 222 West 23rd Street, and end near The Lost & Found (372 8th Ave, New York, NY 10001), for networking and drinks. Rain or shine.

This event is funded, in part, by grants from the New York Community Trust, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and New York City Tourism Foundation.