Dewey's Sit-in Site

In April 1965, the Dewey's restaurant near Rittenhouse Square announced it would refuse service to "homosexuals," "masculine women," "feminine men" and people in "nonconformist clothing." On April 25, some 150 people were turned away. Three teenagers refused to leave the lunch counter and were arrested, along with Clark Polak of the Janus Society, Philadelphia's homophile organization; all were convicted of disorderly conduct. The Janus Society answered with five days of leafleting — 1,500 flyers on a Center City sidewalk in 1965 — and a second sit-in on May 2, which ended without arrests. Dewey's dropped the policy. It was over in a week, and it was historic: one of the earliest LGBT sit-ins in the United States, four years before Stonewall, and remarkable for having been fought first and foremost in defense of gender-nonconforming young people. The building itself is gone — it spent decades as the beloved Little Pete's diner before demolition in 2017 for a hotel tower — but in October 2018 Pennsylvania dedicated a blue state historical marker at the corner of 17th and St. James Streets, the city's eighth LGBT-history marker. What you see today: the marker on a busy Rittenhouse-area corner beside the hotel that replaced the diner. A two-minute stop that connects naturally to the Gay Pioneers marker at Independence Hall and Barbara Gittings Way in the Gayborhood — together they trace how much of the movement's pre-Stonewall groundwork was laid in Philadelphia.