Stonewall Bar to close & gay neighbors glad to see it go. Why? It's too "Hiphop"

[astro]

Stonewall Bar eipicenter of Sonewall Riots to close
Stonewall to Shutter?
Queen Bees Stinging Glad

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For several days now, a conspicuous “For Rent” sign has hung over the door of a gay bar on Christopher Street.

It would hardly be news: Bars open and close every day—and this one isn’t even the oldest one on the block. But because of its name—the Stonewall—the bar has assumed for itself a certain inevitability.

Seventy-six years after the first bar of the same name was opened at 53 Christopher Street, the prospect looms that the historic site of the 1969 riot widely credited as the birth of the gay-rights movement might disappear.

And the neighborhood surrounding the block of Christopher Street just east of Sheridan Square (which has been ceremonially named Stonewall Place) is raising a glass to the Stonewall’s demise.

Born in infamy on a sultry summer night when a ragtag group of drag queens and gay hipsters started hurling bottles at the police who were raiding the bar, the Stonewall, neighbors say, remains riotous—at least for the now ultra-gentrified Greenwich Village.

“They promote these urban youth parties,” said Bill Morgan, the owner of the Duplex, a popular gay nightspot at the end of the block where Stonewall is situated. “They pushed out the regular gay clientele in favor of this new, urban, hip-hop, gangster clientele. Then you bring a bunch of 18-to-20-year-olds in the area who have no place to go and start goofing off and being loud. It’s disruptive to the neighborhood and brings in the wrong element in the neighborhood.”

“Stonewall over the last few years has been a blight on the community and an embarrassment to the gay community,” said Rick Panson, a member of Community Board 2. “The gay community is not looking for a strip-club-mentality lifestyle.”

[Eve]

Can’t someone raise funds to open it as a museum of gay history?

[matt_mcl]

They’re goofing off and being loud? In a dance club? Heaven forfend. :rolleyes: I’m sorry, these folks may well be right, but whenever anyone feels the need to express themself using the term “wrong element,” I start to itch.

Anyway, Eve, it worked for the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, but who knows? Anyway, it’s a National Historic Landmark so I bet they’ll find something to do with it.

[Paul_in_Qatar]

Kids today, with the hair and the clothes! You call that Music? Turn it down! And get my lawn.

I thought gay marriage would have a mellowing effect on the Gay Community.

[mhendo]

@matt_mcl

They’re goofing off and being loud? In a dance club? Heaven forfend. :rolleyes: I’m sorry, these folks may well be right, but whenever anyone feels the need to express themself using the term “wrong element,” I start to itch.

My thoughts exactly.

[Zebra]

It is strange, this area is (now) pretty quiet, but just a block away are several rowdy ‘college’ type bars.

[MsRobyn]

The way I’m reading this, it’s not the fact that it’s changed, it’s the fact that it’s changed into something whose image is not compatible with the rest of the neighborhood, nor with the Stonewall’s history.

I like Eve’s idea of turning it into a museum of gay history.

Robin

[Fiveyearlurker]

@matt_mcl

They’re goofing off and being loud? In a dance club? Heaven forfend. :rolleyes:

He said they “had nowhere to go”. I think they meant that the clientele were goofing off and being loud *outside *of the club.

[waterj2]

A couple years ago, I recall Jacques, Boston’s (and, I’ve heard the US’s) oldest drag bar, facing a similar situation. The neighborhood, Bay Villge, had gotten far more upscale over the years, and the rich queens that lived there were trying to get its liquor license taken away due to noise complaints and being the only decent place in the city to find a transvestite hooker. The place is still there, though.

story

[mhendo]

@MsRobyn

The way I’m reading this, it’s not the fact that it’s changed, it’s the fact that it’s changed into something whose image is not compatible with the rest of the neighborhood, nor with the Stonewall’s history.

Well, it might be true that the Stonewall is increasingly out of character with the Greenwich Village’s yuppified image.

But, as the second page of the article points out, the somewhat ungenteel clientele and atmosphere is actually perfectly in keeping with Stonewall’s history.

But when was the Village’s heyday? Was it when E.E. Cummings and Djuna Barnes prowled the White Horse tavern by night? Was it the heyday of 1969, when the Stonewall was mob-run and one of the biggest back-hole dives in the city? There are accounts of no running water and patrons handing off unwashed glasses. With its dark walls, it was a place that invited everyone, “from German Shepherds on up.”

“In Stonewall’s heyday you had underage hustlers, people selling drugs, and it was really a seedy place,” said Mr. Carter. “Out of a fluke of fate, the Stonewall is probably closer now to what it was in 1969 than the super-gentrified, yuppified Village is to the bohemian Village of 1969.”

“Everything (even the tenements) have been tarted up and the West Village is the most expensive and desirable real estate in Manhattan,” wrote Edmund White, the gay writer, in an e-mail to The Observer. “Before gay liberation, blacks and Hispanics were accepted …. Now white middle-class gays have become as snobbish as their straight counterparts—I guess that’s the price of assimilation, but unfortunately it’s a price that others must pay.”

Also, according to this article, the “hip-hop” crowd that currently patronizes the Stonewall do so for some of the reasons that gays did back in the 1960s—it’s a place where they can be themselves.

The white middle-class gays of Greenwich Village seem to object to working-class black gays from Harlem taking over the Stonewall they no longer have a use for.

The partons of Stonewall have compelling reasons for wanting to keep Stonewall alive, even if the neighbours don’t.

“I’m really comfortable here,” Myke Melendez, a 22-year-old from Harlem, told The Observer.

“If I’m on the street holding a guy’s hand, it’s like whatever. Or if I’m trying to pick a guy up, it’s like whatever. I like it here.”

I agree that it would be great, if the bar is going to close down, to have the place become a museum of gay history. But that is a separate issue from whether the moneyed folks of present-day Greenwich Village should get to dictate what is and isn’t “appropriate” gay culture.

[matt_mcl]

@mhendo

But that is a separate issue from whether the moneyed folks of present-day Greenwich Village should get to dictate what is and isn’t “appropriate” gay culture.

Absolutely. Recently, there have been rumblings of trying to “clean up” the Village in Montreal, essentially meaning no street kids. Leaving aside the fact that a disproportionate share of those street kids are queer, there is a certain irony in cleaning up a place that ended up there after the place it used to be got “cleaned up” by the city administration.

[DMark]

Is the club Stonewall on the exact location of the original? I ask because this incarnation of the bar really hasn’t been there all that long - it wasn’t there when I lived in NY in the late 70’s, so it is not like it is the orignal bar…I remember the last time I was in NYC, Stonewall had opened and I was kind of surprised to see it. A NY friend of mine told me the place was upscale boring, so I am not surprised they have tried to do whatever it takes to bring in a crowd.

The Village was a lot of fun in the late 70’s and the 80’s, but to be quite honest, Greenwich Village’s luster faded during the height of the AIDs crisis and then new clubs and bars started opening in Chelsea and other locations in NY. The Village used to be a funky place to live and the Gay capital of the world, now it is simply an expensive place to live and the neighborhood and residents are nothing like it used to be.

Still, I like the idea of turning the place into a museum, instead of a Baby Gap.