Bayard Rustin Residence

Apartment 9J in Building 7 of the Penn South cooperative was Bayard Rustin's home from September 1962 until his death in 1987 — the longest he ever lived anywhere as an adult. It was from this Chelsea apartment that he pulled together the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in under two months, one of the great feats of organizing in American history. Rustin was the movement's master strategist and its most prominent openly gay man. He had taught Gandhian nonviolent resistance to Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery bus boycott and served as his close advisor — and was repeatedly pushed out of public leadership roles because of his sexuality, doing indispensable work while others took the podium. In later years Rustin turned more of his voice toward gay rights, testifying for New York City's gay rights bill, which finally passed in 1986, a year before his death. Recognition kept arriving after he was gone: the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, and a posthumous California pardon in 2020 for a 1953 morals conviction. His partner Walter Naegle, who moved into 9J in 1977, has kept the apartment much as Rustin left it. The residence was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in March 2016. What you see today: an ordinary brick high-rise in the union-built Penn South complex. The historic apartment is on the ninth floor of an occupied co-op and is not open to the public; there is no plaque. This is a site for those who want to stand where the March on Washington was planned — the visit itself is the sidewalk and the story.