Bughouse Square (Washington Square Park)

Washington Square Park — universally known as Bughouse Square — is Chicago's oldest small park, donated to the city in 1842, and for half a century it was the city's open-air parliament: soapbox orators, radicals, poets and cranks held forth here nightly from the 1910s through the mid-1960s, across the street from the Newberry Library. It was also, quietly, one of the city's earliest gay gathering grounds. In the era when Henry Gerber founded America's first gay-rights organization a short walk away (1924), men found each other here; by 1964, Life magazine was pointing to the park as a known homosexual meeting place — hostile coverage that today reads as documentation. The park's biggest LGBTQ moment came on June 27, 1970, when roughly 150 marchers set out from Bughouse Square toward the Civic Center — the nation's first Pride march, held one day before New York's Christopher Street Liberation Day. In 1979, some 2,000 people marched from here to Daley Plaza against police harassment of gay bars. The park was designated a Chicago Landmark in 1990 and listed on the National Register in 1991, and its restored fountain, period lighting and memorial tablet — "Chicago's Premier Free Speech Forum" — keep the soapbox era visible. What you see today: an elegant, fully public 2.85-acre park, free and open daily, opposite the Newberry Library. Nothing on site marks the LGBTQ history specifically — you bring that knowledge with you, ideally en route to the Henry Gerber House a short ride north.