Harvey Milk High School

When Harvey Milk High School opened in April 1985, nothing like it existed anywhere in the United States: a public high school created specifically for LGBT students who had been bullied, assaulted or driven out of mainstream schools. It grew out of the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth, founded in 1979 by psychiatrist Dr. Emery Hetrick and NYU professor Dr. A. Damien Martin after they heard the story of a homeless gay teenager beaten and thrown out of his shelter. Renamed the Hetrick-Martin Institute in their honor, the organization still runs comprehensive services for at-risk LGBTQ youth — and still shares its Astor Place quarters with the school it created. The school is named for Harvey Milk, the New York-born activist who moved to San Francisco, became one of the first openly gay elected officials in America, and was assassinated in 1978. It remains the only New York City public school intentionally named for an LGBT person. After early years in borrowed rooms — first at Washington Square United Methodist Church, then the LGBT Community Center — the school settled at 2 Astor Place and became a fully accredited NYC Department of Education transfer high school in 2002. What you see today: a working school and youth-services nonprofit on the upper floors of a handsome 1910-12 commercial building at Astor Place. It is not open to visitors and carries no historic plaque — please respect that this is a functioning school. For travelers it is a drive-by piece of living history: the point where the city stopped debating whether queer kids deserved a safe classroom and simply built one.