[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. One week from today, we'll all gather together to discuss this month's Get Lit with All Of It Book Club pick, Rouge by Mona Awad. You still have time to read the sensual spooky novel, which is landing on several best of 2023 lists.

Head to wnyc.org/getlit to learn how to check out your copy of the novel and to reserve a free ticket for the event. We're going to be gathering at 6:00 PM on Monday, November 27th at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch of the New York Public Library, our partners. That's at Fifth Avenue and 40th Street. You can head to our Instagram now @AllOfItWNYC. We have a fun book club question up there now about Freudian slips.

Now, I can't guarantee the library lions across the street will have the wreaths yet, but I can guarantee a great conversation along with a special musical performance from Dear Dear. Again, tickets are free, but they have to be reserved in advance. For more information, go to wnyc.org/getlit, and we will see you in person a week from today. That is the story, so let's get this hour started with some New York City LGBT history.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Okay, so everyone knows in the corner of Seventh Avenue and Christopher stands The Stonewall Inn, a bar where an uprising launched the modern movement for gay rights. If you look just down the street, your eyes would probably skim right past another building, what is now a Bank of America. If you look closely at its façade, if your eyes go up a little bit, you can see it was once an Art Deco beauty. It was the home to Stewart's cafeteria, a bustling 1930s eatery known as a place where newly out gay and lesbian people could find a warm welcome.

That is one of the spots on a map created by NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. On the map, there are more than 450 locations that are important to LGBT history and New York City history, to be frank. In Queens, you can learn the origin story of Julio Rivera Corner at 78th Street and 37th Avenue. Julio's murder was the first gay hate crime case to be tried in New York City. On Staten Island, you can see the home of queer Jamaican-born, New York-raised writer Michelle Cliff. She and her one-time partner, poet Adrienne Rich, were a literary power couple.

Those are just a couple of examples of the riveting, hiding-in-plain-sight stories of queer history. If you're looking for an outside activity this holiday weekend, you might consider a walking tour to uncover the queer history parts of your own neighborhood. With me now are two co-founders of the organization, Andrew Dolkart and Ken Lustbader. Andrew is a professor of historic preservation at Columbia University and Ken is a historic preservation consultant. Thanks for coming to the studio.

Ken Lustbader: Thanks for having us.

Andrew Dolkart: Thanks for having us.

Alison Stewart: A little birdie told me you were looking out of our big-picture window. Were you able to point out sights all over downtown? That's so exciting. Can't wait to hear more about it. Listeners, we want to hear from you. What is on your map of New York's LGBT history? What LGBT historic site do you always wonder more about, or maybe it's a site where an LGBT historical figure lived?

Our phone lines are open for you. Call us, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can join us on air. You can also text us at that number or you can reach out on social media @AllOfItWNYC. Pay respect to a historic site that used to exist or maybe a site like a bar or a theater or a park you would frequent back in the day. Tell us, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Andrew, how did this organization come to be?

Andrew Dolkart: Well, all of us who are involved with it, the three co-founders and our one staff member, we're all graduates of the Historic Preservation Program at Columbia. We all believe very strongly in the power of place. We saw that we were interpreting all kinds of history, but we weren't interpreting our own history. We wanted to do something that looked for LGBT sites and really made the invisible history of gay and lesbian people more visible. That was the genesis of starting this project.

Alison Stewart: Ken, what is it that is meaningful or important about place and about luring history through place?

Ken Lustbader: Sure, there's a difference of looking at a building or a resource or a park or a location where history took place. It allows you to time travel to go back to have a visceral connection to the past and see where history took place. For example, you could look at the place where James Baldwin lived on the Upper West Side and you could see the doorway he went into to his apartment on the ground floor. That's a definite connection to an individual who is so important to American history. It's different than simply reading about it in a book or reading about someone who lived on the Upper West Side. There's the location and that's the connection.

Alison Stewart: Andrew, what do you want to add to our understanding about LGBT history? I think New Yorkers might think, "Oh, I've got a pretty good sense of it."

Andrew Dolkart: Well, I think that, one thing, we want people to understand that there is a vast LGBT history before Stonewall. That's something that we're really, really interested in, also that there's a queer history all over New York City as you mentioned before in Staten Island, in Queens, in the Bronx, in Brooklyn. It's not just in Greenwich Village and Chelsea. I think that these are really important things. What's also really key is that we want to layer history. We want to add layers to the history of what people already know, so adding layers to the history of Greenwich Village or any other neighborhood of New York.

Alison Stewart: I want to actually ask about Stewart's cafeteria. I walk by that every day on my way to work. I had no idea. I know exactly where the location is. It's down the street from Stonewall, just barely. What do you want people to know about Stewart's cafeteria?

Andrew Dolkart: Well, as you noted, it's this really nice Art Deco building.

Alison Stewart: It's really pretty.

Andrew Dolkart: Yes, it's really pretty, but one doesn't really know that it has a really important history. Stewart's was a place where people could be out in the 1930s. People were pretty flamboyant there and it was very well-known. In fact, Paul Cadmus, the very important American painter, painted a painting of it, of people being really raucous. On one side of the painting, this clearly gay man is inviting you into the bathroom with him.

Alison Stewart: He's got nail polish on. He's looking over his shoulder, come-hither. [laughs]

Andrew Dolkart: This place was closed by the district attorney's office.

Alison Stewart: Oh, my gosh.

Andrew Dolkart: What they said was really quite extraordinary for us to read in the 21st century. The DA's complaint cited certain persons of the homosexual type and certain persons of the lesbian type who remained therein and engaged in acts of sapphism and diverse other obscene, indecent, and disgusting acts, and that it was used as a rendezvous for perverts, degenerates, homosexuals, and other evil-disposed person. This is really shocking to read like, "I'm an evil-disposed person?" That was the tenor of the time in the 1930s.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Let's talk to Dustin calling in from Chelsea. Hi, Dustin. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Dustin: Hi, thank you. Thanks so much for the topic. I really appreciate you taking my call. Just a couple of things very quick. I am a filmmaker and photographer/historian that's been photographing since the '60s and '70s and '80s. I'm very, very familiar with the LGBQT community. I just want to mention two places very quickly. One was the firehouse, which was down in Lafayette around Center Street, which was a very, very, very safe community at the time that we used to have dances and movie screenings and performances.

That was way ahead of the Stonewall '69 uprising. Of course, there were other ones, but the other one that was very, I guess, famous was the Edgar Allan Poe House, which was owned at one time by the poet and writer, Edgar Allan Poe, and was on West 3rd Street in the village right off MacDougal. They used to have community dances there. At times, they were raided, but it was a safe community. This is before Stonewall '69.

Alison Stewart: Dustin, thank you for calling in. Let's talk to Paige from the Upper West Side. Hi, Paige, thanks for calling All Of It.

Paige: Hi, thanks so much for taking my call. I wanted to shout out a business not too far from Stonewall. Actually, I'm at 129 MacDougal Street known as Eve's Hangout or Eve Adams' Tearoom. It was one of the first lesbian bars not just in New York but in America, in the country founded by Eve Adams, who was a queer Jewish-Polish immigrant.

She owned and operated this during Prohibition and had this huge community of Jews and lesbians and people who didn't really have another place to go and gather during this time. She's a really important figure in Jewish history and queer history. She actually went on to publish a book of short stories called Lesbian Love, which is considered the first modern depiction of lesbian life in America. She's just so important. Not very many people know about her, so I take every opportunity I can to give her a shout-out.

Alison Stewart: Thank you, Paige, for calling in.

Ken Lustbader: If you go to our website, which is easily found, you can find all the information you want in a nutshell about Eve's Hangout, which is an important location, as well as the firehouse, which the prior caller mentioned, which is on West 3rd Street, and was a very important community space. Both callers referenced community spaces, gathering spots. These are really important spaces for people. Commercial spaces were critical for gay and lesbian, queer people to gather because you couldn't do this at home, you couldn't do this on the street, and so forth. If you go to our website, two of those locations are very well-researched.

Andrew Dolkart: I think it's really important that we do many, many different things as the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, but our central focus is this website. We invite people to look because the entries are very comprehensive.

Alison Stewart: It's really fun. You can decide you want to look via borough. You can decide you want to look via subject where there's community or if you want to look via arts. It's a really interesting way. You can create your own adventure each time.

Ken Lustbader: Sure. One thing we didn't emphasize is we go from the 17th century, if not earlier, to the year 2000. We're looking at a wide range of years and a wide range of communities and diversity within those communities.

Alison Stewart: Ooh, what's something from the 17th century?

Ken Lustbader: Well, it's a place of execution. Again, it's history.

Alison Stewart: Well, it's history. History is important, all parts of history.

Ken Lustbader: We're working to identify Indigenous sites as well to really look at the complexity of addressing those type of resources.

Alison Stewart: What's a very recent site, example of a very recent site?

Ken Lustbader: Up to 2000. I would say, for example, St. Vincent's Hospital, which is, obviously, in Greenwich Village and such an important location for the AIDS epidemic.

Alison Stewart: We are talking to Andrew Dolkart and Ken Lustbader, co-founders of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. They are sharing some of the sites on this map that they have created. You can create your own walking tour, visit some of these locations. Maybe one's right in your neighborhood and you didn't even know. We would love for you to get in on this conversation. What is on your map of New York's LGBT history? What place do you want to shout out? Some place you'd love people to know about or maybe a place that you have visited or someplace that has meaning to you?

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can call in and join us on air. You can text to us at that number as well. You can also reach out on social media @AllOfItWNYC. This is one place that I went and found because I had read Lorraine Hansberry's bio. Lorraine Hansberry lived at 337 Bleecker Street. It's where she wrote A Raisin in the Sun. How did she explore and think about her own sexuality in her writing while living in this apartment?

Ken Lustbader: Well, she lived there from 1953 to 1960. She actually was married and lived there at the time. That's where she actually wrote A Raisin in the Sun. In today's lingo, she pitched it to a friend who then turned into being one of the co-producers. While living there, she also explored her homosexuality through relationships, through her writing, and through her social circle. She lived a somewhat compartmentalized life writing for The Ladder, which was a publication of the Daughters of Bilitis, which was an early lesbian rights organization.

She wrote under a pseudonym, but she really was conflicted. Each year, she put together a list of her likes and dislikes of herself. On one column, it said, "likes homosexuality or lesbianism." On the other side, it said her dislikes. Again, the evidence and the reality of her life was very complex and she went on. Obviously, she was also involved with the Black civil rights movement, James Baldwin, and so forth. It's important to know that story because it makes her a more complicated, richer narrative of who she was as a person.

Alison Stewart: What's the process of getting places in the state historic registry?

Andrew Dolkart: Well, we are very interested in getting some of the sites that we've identified listed as official landmarks, either by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission or listed on the National Register of Historic Places. We've been doing a lot of National Register nominations in which we write the nomination, which includes a lot of background research.

One of the most interesting things that we've been doing is revising previous National Register nominations, so taking sites that were already deemed historic like the Alice Austen House on Staten Island, which was the home of a very important early woman photographer. It didn't mention anything about the fact that she lived for over 50 years with Gertrude Tate.

We have rewritten the National Register nomination. We've rewritten the National Register nomination for the Henry Street Settlement to deal with the homosocial world of Lillian Wald and the others who live there. We are currently redoing the Greenwich Village National Register nomination to do a queer overlay on Greenwich Village. This gives things national recognition.

Alison Stewart: What about Maurice Sendak's home and studio?

Ken Lustbader: Oh, that's at 29 West 9th Street between 5th and 6th and that's a--

Alison Stewart: It's a Gold Coast now.

[laughter]

Ken Lustbader: Yes, he lived there between 1962 and 1972. While living there, again, this is a residence like Lorraine Hansberry, he wrote Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, two of the most bestselling, award-winning books. He lived there with his partner. The complexity of life that he lived was one as a children's book author. In the 1970 New York Times article profiling him, they called him a bachelor, and he had a friend who he lived with. That friend was his partner of 50-plus years. He said at a later part of his life that he kept his homosexuality quiet because he didn't want to impact his career.

Alison Stewart: We've been talking about the village, but I loved seeing that there's a place in Midtown, the Winter Garden Theatre. I think about Mamma Mia! and Cats.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Now, Back to the Future, very straightforward juggernauts. Before these big Broadway juggernauts were in this theater, what could you see at the Winter Garden?

Andrew Dolkart: We're really interested in the place that queer people had in New York's culture and in American culture. That includes the theaters. In fact, on our website, you can find an entry on every single Broadway theater. To me, the Winter Garden is the one that really exemplifies the contribution that LGBT people have made more than any other and particularly with the fact that West Side Story opened there in 1957. Everybody knows West Side Story, but everybody necessarily know that it was almost entirely a gay and lesbian venture.

Jerome Robbins, who was the director and choreographer, Leonard Bernstein, who was the composer, Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book, Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics, Oliver Smith, who did the sets, Irene Sharaff, who did the costumes, Jean Rosenthal, who did the lighting, Larry Kert, who was the star, plus others. Then once you start looking at the history of the Winter Garden, many, many other productions and really important queer artists have been involved at the theater. This gives, I think, a whole new way of understanding both theater in New York and the importance that LGBT people have had in the cultural life of America.

Ken Lustbader: It shows our project doesn't want to be just self-referential like Stonewall, which you mentioned, which is about gay history, LGBTQ history. It's really to also show the community's influence on American history and culture. That's a really important point that it broadens people's understanding of what we're doing. We're creating a cultural landscape showing that there's gay life everywhere and that, by doing so, we're not just looking at tangible buildings and preserving them and identifying them.

We're allowing people today to look at those past connections and have a sense of pride, a sense of continuity, and identity to know that they're not alone, that people came before them. That's a really important element to help people today understand their own lives as well as activism, which is obviously really important now with the pushback.

Alison Stewart: Our phone lines are starting to fill up. We're getting several texts. We'll get to all of your texts and your calls about LGBT history. We'll also head out to Brooklyn to find out a little bit about the Starlite Lounge in Crown Heights. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests are the co-founders of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, Andrew Dolkart and Ken Lustbader. We are talking about sites all around New York City that's important to LGBT history, to American History, to New York City history. You wanted to shout out the website before-- I don't want to forget.

Andrew Dolkart: The key thing that we do is our website. Go check us out at www.nyclgbtsites.org.

Ken Lustbader: You can follow us on social media @nyclgbtsites.

Alison Stewart: IT is the Starlite Lounge in Crown Heights. Who ran the Starlite Lounge?

Andrew Dolkart: Well, this is actually my favorite site because one of the things that we're really interested in is the vernacular architecture of New York, the everyday buildings that you'd walk right by, and you would never notice until it's pointed out that it really has a very, very important history. The Starlite Lounge was on the corner of Bergen Street and Nostrand Avenue in Crown Heights.

It opened in 1962. It was opened by Harold "Mackie" Harris. It was an openly gay bar for African Americans at a time when there were very few venues for African Americans because a lot of bars were very discriminatory, and also that it was a privately owned bar. It wasn't a mafia-run bar. It became a local institution for almost 50 years.

At the time, it was about to close because the building had a new owner and people were protesting. People stood outside with signs that said that this was New York's oldest Black-owned non-discriminatory bar in New York. Just the power of these people, this was such a central space for this community that they fought as hard as they could to save it. Now, there's just a bodega in it and you forget that this had this incredibly rich history.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Mark calling in from the Bronx. Hi, Mark. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Mark: Hello. I'm calling about Pfaff's beer cellar at 647 Broadway right near Bond Street. It was in an old hotel building that still stands, but I think the beer cellar has been overhauled since then, but you can still see the area where it was. You walked down into it. It was under the street and the patrons of the Ratskeller would watch people's feet as they walked by. This was back in the mid-19th century when that area of the West Village or the East Village was the theater district.

The Pfaff's beer cellar was frequented by all sorts of Bohemians, the first Bohemian gathering place in the United States ever. Gay people too, it was there. Walt Whitman would go there. Lots of well-known literary types of the day would go there, which reminds me, Walt Whitman also has a house in Brooklyn, but it isn't even taken care of. It's just somebody who owns it privately. I'd love to see that.

Alison Stewart: Mark, let me dive in. I want to ask that question. Some of these sites, are they places where they're in disrepair now, or maybe someone lives there and isn't necessarily as interested in being a part of the history?

Ken Lustbader: Yes, we're talking about privately owned commercial buildings, residential buildings. In some cases, they're in various states of disrepair. I just want to add to the caller about Pfaff's. He did mention Walt Whitman, but that also has another overlay of history. Upstairs was The Loft, which, in 1970, became the place, which was the beginning of house music and house parties and disco. We have multiple layers of history in that building.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Ken Lustbader: It's a whole another track that we take.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Maria calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Maria. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Maria: Hi. I wanted to know if you guys knew about the Hetrick-Martin Institute. It's created about 30 years ago to help gay teens specifically. My good friend, Joyce Hunter, has been really active in helping out gay teens all these years. They helped create the Harvey Milk School for gay teens who had been badly bullied in regular school. I know they were on 23rd Street for a while and then they moved downtown. I don't know their history after that though, but they were really important in terms of helping gay teens.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Ken Lustbader: The caller talks about history, Joyce Hunter. Joyce Hunter is a really important person. We have IPLGY, which was the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth on 23rd Street. That involved speaking to Joyce Hunter to get that history as well as other people and then we track it down to Harvey Milk High School on Astor Place.

Andrew Dolkart: In addition, we have put burial sites on our website too. We have very extensive entries for Green-Wood Cemetery and Woodlawn Cemetery. Hetrick and Martin are both buried at Green-Wood Cemetery. We do Green-Wood Cemetery tours and we always go and plant rainbow flags at their grave.

Alison Stewart: Someone has texted, "Which areas were the most surprising to find?"

Andrew Dolkart: Staten Island. We didn't really realize the rich queer history on Staten Island. We have to shout out to our colleague, Gale Harris, who did a lot of research for us on sites in Staten Island. That was just thrilling to find out about.

Alison Stewart: Well, we heard Staten Island, Brooklyn, Manhattan. Let's head to the Bronx, home of a pioneer, Christine Jorgensen, her childhood residence. On the site, you have a clip of the story of how her sex reassignment surgery was covered back in the day. Let's listen to that and we can talk about it on the other side.

[music]

Reporter: Christine Jorgensen, who used to answer to George, creates quite a stir as she returns home to New York from Copenhagen. Christine hit the headlines following the series of operations in Denmark that transformed her from a boy into a girl.

[background conversation]

Christine Jorgensen: Very impressed by everyone coming.

Interviewer: Christine, are you happy to be home?

Christine Jorgensen: Yes, of course. What American wouldn't be?

Interviewer: Have you been offered a movie contract?

Christine Jorgensen: Yes, but I haven't accepted it.

Interviewer: Do you have any plans regarding the theater?

Christine Jorgensen: No, I don't think so.

Interviewer: Are you going to go on with your photography?

Christine Jorgensen: I hope so, yes.

Interviewer: I see.

Christine Jorgensen: I'm very happy to be back and I don't have any plans at the moment and I thank you all for coming, but I think it's too much.

Alison Stewart: What's important to know about her life?

Ken Lustbader: Well, this is 1952, 1953. This is well before people's general understanding of what transgender means today, non-binary, non-variant, and so forth, or just the general term "queer." Christine Jorgensen served in the US Army, comes back. 1952, goes to Denmark. Upon returning with her gender reassignment surgery, The Daily News covers this when it became public, Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty. Christine Jorgensen was unapologetic in her visibility and in her ability to discuss this.

It really set a benchmark for people's understanding of what gender variance may be or a different understanding of it and putting the word "transsexual," which was the terminology at the time, in the American vocabulary. She was probably, at one point, the most famous person in the world for this and went on to have a successful celebrity career and so forth. It also allows us to talk about trans medical care in a very early period that people don't think existed because it seems to be something that we're only talking about today. This began in Germany in the 19-teens and came to America and, in New York City, was a very important location for this. We tried to use these stories to tell broader stories.

Alison Stewart: What's been challenging? What's been hard about the project?

Andrew Dolkart: Oh, I think that the hardest thing has been, of course, to get the word out about what we've been doing, but also to get people to understand that this layering of history is really, really significant. We have, on occasion, still come upon homophobic people that we wanted to list one particular building on the National Register of Historic Places. We needed the owner's consent.

The owner said they didn't want to be the gay house on the block. Just getting the word out is always a challenge. It's really exciting that more and more people are becoming interested in this kind of of research and that we had hope when we founded this that we would be a model for this all over the country. We're seeing this more and more that people all over the country are getting really interested in doing this kind of work.

Alison Stewart: I think we have time for one more call. Kim is calling us from Florida actually. Hi, Kim. Thanks for calling in.

Kim: Hey, thanks for having me. By the way, now that I'm a transplant, I listen religiously. It's been really great to hear a New York voice every day. First of all, thank you for the program. It's wonderful and I'm glad to hear all of the accomplishments that you guys are doing. I wanted to bring up about lesbian bars, especially the Duchess and Bonnie & Clyde's in the village. Duchess was in Sheridan Square, Bonnie & Clyde's on West 3rd Street. Really big institutions in the '70s, great social places. Do you guys have any input on that? Any word on that including in your project?

Andrew Dolkart: Well, most of those bars are on our site. If you check out our site, you'll see them. In fact, two weekends ago, we did a lesbian tour of Greenwich Village. We stopped at many of those sites to talk about their importance and, in fact, about how Seventh Avenue South was basically a lesbian main street in the 1960s and 1970s.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to, I'm going to slide one more call in if it's okay, Dorla Mercedes, who's calling from Brooklyn. Dorla, hello.

Dorla Mercedes: Hi, hi, hi. Thanks for having this program. At one time, I had worked at a village nursing home. What I was told then by one of the administrators is that that place was going into receivership. It must have been in the '70s, '80s. A group of folk or either gay, lesbian got together and formed a board of directors and took it over so that they could take care of persons of those lifestyles. Seeing that in other settings, they were being mocked or not received very positively. I don't know. It was at the corner of 12th Street in Hudson.

Alison Stewart: I know exactly what you're talking about.

Dorla Mercedes: Believe me, it was great. Another place was on, I think, either Quincy or Gates Avenue between Franklin and Classon. Somewhere there was a huge mansion. The first floor was a club. Then upstairs, they had residence rooms for persons of either gay or lesbian lifestyle. I'm going back to '71, '72. I'm wondering what happened to that with a beautiful mansion.

Alison Stewart: Do you know?

Ken Lustbader: Not of the Brooklyn site, which is interesting.

Andrew Dolkart: That's a great site that we'll have to look into. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] You know what you're doing the rest of the week. Shout out the website one more time.

Ken Lustbader: www.nyclgbtsites.org.

Alison Stewart: My guests have been Andrew Dolkart and Ken Lustbader. Thank you so much for sharing all this history with us.

Andrew Dolkart: Thank you for having us.

Ken Lustbader: Thanks and happy Thanksgiving.

Alison Stewart: Halloween too. We like all the holidays around here.

[laughter]

 

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