New York City is "taking pride" in its storied LGBTQ history, with an interactive online map showing the historic gay landmarks around the Village over the past 150 years.
Produced by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, which just declared the Stonewall Inn the city's first official cultural landmark, the map is a geographic history of places where gay New Yorkers lived their lives.
The LPC even included a landmark that doesn't exist yet: the city's first significant AIDS Memorial, coming to 12th Street and Greenwich Avenue.
The locations on the map date back to the 1800s, when Bleecker Street was known for its dive bars that catered to gay men and men who dressed in drag.
For example, The Slide, at 157 Bleecker St., was a famed gay bar in the 1890s, named for a term used by prostitutes to describe “an establishment where male homosexuals dressed as women and solicited men,” according to the LPC.
That location is now a "gastropub" called Carroll Place. It used to be the music venue Kenny's Castaways until the venue shuttered in 2012.
The LPC's map is detailed in its history, but does not say what currently exists at those addresses.
Here are some highlights from the map, and what they've now become:
► 647 Broadway was a bar frequented by Walt Whitman, and later a nightclub called "The Loft" that hosted underground dance parties in the 1970s.
It is now a shoe store called Zigi Shoes.
► The apartments at 457 Sixth Ave. now rent for more than $3,000 per month. In the Tammany Hall era, one of the top floor apartments was home to a transgender politician known as a “man about town” who was revealed after death to have been born a woman, according to the LPC.
► 183 Bleecker St., now 1849 Restaurant, was a dive bar called The Black Rabbit, frequented by effeminate gay men, according to the LPC.
► 156 Bleecker St. was a boarding house for working class gay men. It's now a high-end apartment building where studios rent for $3,000, with a Capital One bank on the ground floor.
► 129 MacDougal St., now an Italian restaurant, was in 1925 a lesbian bar with a sign that read “men are admitted but not welcome." The bar's Polish-Jewish lesbian owner was deported after being convicted of "obscenity" and disorderly conduct.
► The Second Avenue movie theater was a Yiddish playhouse before becoming the Mafia-controlled 181 Club, which was referred to as “the homosexual Copacabana,” according to the LPC.
► The openly gay author James Baldwin rented an apartment at 81 Horatio St., which was recently renovated into a single home and sold for $20 million in 2012.
► Edie Windsor, whose lawsuit made the Supreme Court strike down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, met her wife in 1963 at a Thompson Street restaurant called Portofino, which was “a discreet Friday meeting place for lesbians,” according to the LPC.
The restaurant is now a pub called The Malt House.
Some places have seen less change.
The music venue Webster Hall was similar in the early 1900s, when it hosted drag balls.
Julius’ Bar, which activists are hoping to get landmarked like Stonewall, has barely been altered at all since gay new Yorkers staged a "sip in" to protest the management's discrimination against gay people in the 1960s.
The LPC's map also includes the Wooster Street Firehouse, another site that activists are urging them to declare an official landmark.
And the first gay and lesbian synagogue, established in 1973, is still active at 57 Bethune St., according to the LPC.
Check out the LPC's map for more information on these and other important LGBTQ locations worthy of a tour this Pride weekend.
