Christopher Park is the location of the Stonewall National Monument, designated by President Obama in June 2016. During the 1960s, the park was a popular hangout for LGBT youth. On the night of the Stonewall uprising, crowds, including many street youth, took over the park. Longtime activist Marsha P. Johnson could often be found in the park and on Christopher Street. Sculptor George Segal’s "Gay Liberation", designed to commemorate LGBT liberation, was placed in the park in 1992.

The original Stonewall Inn was located in two buildings at 51-53 Christopher Street. Between June 28 and July 3, 1969, homeless LGBTQ teens, trans women of color, lesbians, drag queens, gay men, and allies decided to take a stand. What started out as a routine police raid of the bar turned into a multi-night uprising on the nearby streets. The events during this period are seen as a key turning point in the LGBT civil rights movement, with large numbers of groups soon forming around the country.

This is the former site of Stewart’s (later Life) Cafeteria, which opened in 1933 and became a popular bohemian and gay and lesbian haunt. Cafeterias were ideal social gathering places where patrons could linger. The large windows put gay life on full display to the late-night crowds who frequented this busy intersection at the new Christopher Street subway stop. Stewart’s was raucously depicted by famous gay artist Paul Cadmus in his painting "Greenwich Village Cafeteria" (1934).

This building housed the Mattachine Society's last office, from 1972 until the group dissolved in 1976. Founded in Los Angeles in 1950, with a New York chapter in 1955, Mattachine was a leading American “homophile" group. In this conservative era, campaigning for the rights of LGBT people was considered radical. Mattachine challenged the State Liquor Authority’s ban on serving gay people at the famous Sip-In at Julius’ Bar in 1966 and worked to stop police entrapment of gay men.

The commercial space of this building once held several lesbian bars from the 1970s to the 1990s, beginning with the Duchess in 1972, which was closed when the city revoked its liquor license under Mayor Edward Koch. Pandora’s Box, the last lesbian bar to occupy this space when it closed around 1992, was popular with Black and Latina lesbians.

Founded by four veterans of the Caffe Cino (the pioneering gay theater and Off-Off-Broadway venue), the Circle Repertory Theater welcomed plays with gay themes and characters when it was located in this space building from 1969 to 1994. The company was the home to two pioneering gay figures in theater – playwright Lanford Wilson and director Marshall Mason.

On April 21, 1966, a “Sip-In” was organized by members of the Mattachine Society, one of the country’s earliest gay rights organizations, to challenge the State Liquor Authority’s discriminatory policy of revoking the licenses of bars that served known or suspected gay men and lesbians. The publicized event – at which they were refused service after intentionally revealing they were “homosexuals” – was one of the earliest pre-Stonewall public actions for LGBT rights.

In 1973, Craig Rodwell moved his Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the first gay and lesbian bookstore on the East Coast (and the first of its kind in the nation to operate long term), from its original home on Mercer Street to this prominent location on Christopher Street, near the center of New York City’s gay life. The shop occupied this site for over 35 years, until it closed in 2009.

In 1970, less than a year after Stonewall, the police raided the Snake Pit bar, which once occupied the basement space of this building, and detained many people at the local police station. After one person attempted to escape and was impaled on a fence, the Gay Activists Alliance and Gay Liberation Front quickly assembled a protest march, the results of which demonstrated the strength of the recently formed gay rights organizations and inspired more people to become politically active.

From 1953 to 1960, playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry resided in the third-floor apartment of this building. While here, Hansberry lived parallel lives: one as the celebrated playwright of "A Raisin in the Sun", the first play by a Black woman to appear on Broadway, and the other, as a woman who privately explored her homosexuality through her writing, relationships, and social circle.