The Stonewall riots were six nights of street fighting between New York police and the patrons of a Mafia-run gay bar in Greenwich Village, starting in the early hours of Saturday 28 June 1969. Nobody died, the bar reopened within days, and the New York Times gave it a few paragraphs on page 33. Yet a year later the first Pride marches walked out of that corner, and today the bar is a National Monument. This guide tells you what actually happened, who was there, why this raid and not the dozens before it, and how to visit the place in 2026 without the gift-shop version.
What the Stonewall Inn was in 1969
The Stonewall Inn sat at 51–53 Christopher Street, two former stables knocked together, with blacked-out windows and a doorman behind a peephole. It had no liquor licence. In 1969 the New York State Liquor Authority could refuse or revoke a licence for serving "disorderly" customers, and homosexuals counted as disorderly by definition, so almost every gay bar in the city operated illegally. The gap was filled by the Genovese crime family, who bought the Stonewall in 1966, ran it as a "bottle club", watered the drinks, skipped the plumbing (glasses were rinsed in a tub of standing water) and paid the Sixth Precinct roughly $1,200 a month to be left mostly alone.
It was also, by the standards of the time, the best gay bar in New York. It was one of the only places where men could dance together. The crowd was younger and poorer than at the discreet uptown spots: street kids who slept in Christopher Park, drag queens, butch lesbians, Black and Puerto Rican queens from the Bronx and Harlem, and plenty of ordinary men in office shirts. Entry was a few dollars, drinks were overpriced, and everybody knew the lights flashing white meant a raid was in progress and you should stop dancing.
Raids were routine. The Stonewall had been raided the Tuesday before. The usual script was quick: police checked IDs, arrested anyone without them, anyone in "fewer than three gender-appropriate garments" (the informal rule used to arrest cross-dressers) and the staff, then left. The patrons went home. That is what was supposed to happen on 28 June.
The night of 28 June 1969
At about 1:20 a.m. eight officers of the Public Morals squad, led by Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, entered the bar. The raid was unusual in two ways. It happened late on a Friday night when the bar was full, about 200 people, rather than in the early evening. And the backup patrol wagons were late, so the arrested patrons and staff had to be held inside while a crowd of released customers gathered on the pavement instead of dispersing.
The crowd grew to several hundred, fed by people coming out of other bars on Christopher Street. The mood turned when a patrol wagon arrived and officers started loading people into it. Accounts agree on the sequence more than on the names: a lesbian in handcuffs, generally identified as Stormé DeLarverie, fought four officers for several minutes, was hit with a baton, and shouted at the crowd, "Why don't you guys do something?" Coins came first (a jab at the police payoffs), then bottles, then bricks from a nearby construction site. The police retreated inside the bar and barricaded the door. Someone tore a parking meter out of the ground and used it as a battering ram. Lighter fluid went through the window.
The Tactical Patrol Force, a riot squad trained for anti-war demonstrations, arrived around 2 a.m. and tried to clear Christopher Street in formation. The crowd kept slipping around the short blocks of the Village and reappearing behind them. The image that survived from that night is a kick line of queens facing the riot police and singing, to the tune of a vaudeville number, "We are the Stonewall girls, we wear our hair in curls." By 4 a.m. the street was quiet. Thirteen people had been arrested, four officers were injured, and the inside of the bar was wrecked.
The six days that followed
The Stonewall reopened the next evening, selling soft drinks, with "We homosexuals plead with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the Village" chalked on the boarded-up window by the Mattachine Society, the older, cautious homophile group. Nobody listened. Saturday night brought a bigger crowd, thousands by some estimates, open kissing and hand-holding on the street in front of the police, and a second night of fighting that ran until the early hours.
Sunday and Monday were calmer, partly because of rain. Wednesday 2 July flared again after the Village Voice ran two articles that described the rioters with words like "faggotry" and "limp wrists", and a crowd marched on the Voice offices, which were on Christopher Street. That was the last night of serious trouble.
What distinguished Stonewall from earlier confrontations was not its size but what happened next. Within a month, meetings held in the Village had produced the Gay Liberation Front, a group that borrowed its name from the Vietnamese National Liberation Front and its tactics from the Black Power and anti-war movements. By December, members frustrated with the GLF's broad politics had split off to form the Gay Activists Alliance, which focused on gay rights specifically and invented the "zap", the confrontational public action. For the first time the movement was loud, young and unwilling to ask politely.
Who was there, and the myth problem
Three names come up in every retelling, and the record is messier than the murals. Marsha P. Johnson, a Black drag queen and street activist, was at the Stonewall that week and by her own account arrived after the fighting had started on the first night, not before. Sylvia Rivera, a Puerto Rican trans activist who was 17 at the time, later said she was there and threw one of the first bottles; some historians doubt she was present on the first night. Stormé DeLarverie, a Black butch lesbian and drag king, is the most likely candidate for the woman whose arrest set the crowd off, although she never claimed it with certainty. Johnson and Rivera went on to found STAR, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, in 1970, which housed homeless trans youth, and both are now commemorated with a planned monument in the Village.
The honest version is that nobody threw "the first brick", that the people who fought hardest that night were the ones with the least to lose, the homeless kids and the queens who were arrested every week anyway, and that the movement which followed was built, over years, by thousands of people who were not there at all.
Stonewall was also not the first fight. Trans women and drag queens battled police at Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco's Tenderloin in August 1966, and a raid on the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles on New Year's Day 1967 led to one of the first organised gay protests in the United States. Stonewall is remembered because of what it started, not because it was unique.
From a riot to a parade
On 28 June 1970, the first anniversary, a few thousand people marched from Christopher Street up Sixth Avenue to Central Park under the name Christopher Street Liberation Day. The organisers had expected a few hundred. Chicago held its march the day before, Los Angeles and San Francisco the same weekend. By the mid-1970s the marches had spread across North America and Western Europe, and the word "Pride" had replaced "Liberation". Every Pride parade on the calendar today, from São Paulo's three million to a first march in a Balkan town, is a descendant of that walk up Sixth Avenue.
June became Pride Month for the same reason. The NYC Pride March still takes place on the last Sunday of June and still passes through the West Village, finishing a few blocks from the bar. In 2019, for the 50th anniversary, New York hosted WorldPride and an estimated five million people came.
The Stonewall today
The bar closed in late 1969, after the Mafia owners lost interest in a place that was now famous, and the building spent two decades as a bagel shop, a shoe store and a Chinese restaurant. The current Stonewall Inn, in the 53 Christopher Street half of the original, opened in 1991 and has been continuously run as a gay bar since. It is a neighbourhood bar, not a museum: two floors, a pool table, cheap drinks by Manhattan standards, drag and karaoke most nights, and a crowd that mixes locals, pilgrims and tourists who read the plaque outside. It takes its history seriously without being solemn about it, and the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative funds grassroots LGBTQ+ groups in places that have nothing like it.
Across the street is Christopher Park, a small triangle with George Segal's "Gay Liberation" sculpture, four ghostly white figures installed in 1992 after a decade of local objections. On 24 June 2016 President Obama designated the park and the surrounding streets the Stonewall National Monument, the first unit of the National Park system devoted to LGBTQ+ history. The Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center opened at 51 Christopher Street, the other half of the original bar, on 28 June 2024, run by the nonprofit Pride Live with the National Park Service. In early 2025 the Park Service removed references to transgender people from the monument's official website, which drew protests at the site; the Visitor Center's own exhibits were not changed.
Visiting: what is worth your time
- The bar. Go in the evening, order a drink, read the newspaper clippings on the wall. Weeknights are quieter and friendlier for conversation; Friday and Saturday fill up by 10 p.m. The NYC gay bars page covers what is around it in the West Village and up in Hell's Kitchen.
- Christopher Park and the plaques. Five minutes, free, open from dawn. The Segal figures and the bronze plaques on the park railing tell the story in short form.
- The Visitor Center. 51 Christopher Street, free, closed Mondays, with a reconstructed section of the 1969 bar interior, the original jukebox-era sound, and oral-history listening posts. Allow 45 minutes.
- Walking tours. Several operators run two-hour LGBTQ+ history walks through the Village that start or end at the bar. Christopher Street itself, from the Hudson River piers (the old cruising ground and the setting of "Paris Is Burning") to Sheridan Square, is the route.
- The anniversary. 28 June, whatever the day of the week, brings a rally outside the bar in the evening. If it falls on Pride weekend, the whole street is a party. Book a hotel in New York months ahead for late June; rates double.
Keep this page honest
History pages attract tidy stories. If you were there, if a date above is wrong, or if the Visitor Center hours change, tell us through the contact form and we will correct it with a source.