The Fight to Protect LGBTQ+ History South of Union Square
Pride Month is an important time to honor the struggles and contributions of the LGBTQ+ community in New York City and beyond. While some key sites across the city have been landmarked to recognize that history — including those we’ve campaigned for in our neighborhoods — numerous sites essential to the progress made remain unprotected and thus vulnerable to demolition. Village Preservation has been advocating for landmark designation of these locations and many more within our proposed South of Union Square Historic District.
One such site is the exquisitely detailed Renaissance Revival–style building at 80 Fifth Avenue that dates to 1908. From 1973 to 1986, 80 Fifth was the home of the National Gay Task Force (today known as the National LGBTQ Task Force), the first national LGBT rights organization in the United States. In that initial 13 years of its existence, the task force achieved pioneering social, legal, and political change, and laid the groundwork for more in years to come.
For example, in 1973 the organization successfully lobbied to have homosexuality removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, where it had been categorized as a mental illness since 1952. In 1975, the Task Force successfully advocated for the end of the decades-long ban on gay people working for the federal government. Two years later, the task force organized the first meeting of any LGBTQ+ group with the White House, leading to policy changes within the Bureau of Prisons, the Public Health Service, and eventually the Democratic Party platform. In the late 1970s, the Task Force conducted surveys of hiring policies at corporations and police departments, which eventually helped lead to protections against discrimination in hiring on the basis of sexual orientation.
The task force also led the national response to a wave of hate crimes against LGBTQ+ individuals. In 1982 it spearheaded its Anti-Violence Project, which focused on data gathering on anti-LGBTQ hate crimes and yielded reports considered authoritative when it came to recognizing homophobic violence. The organization’s efforts also laid the groundwork for passage of the Hate Crimes Statistics Act in 1990, the first federal law to address sexual orientation. These were just a few of the National Gay Task Force’s accomplishments in its time at 80 Fifth Avenue.
That building is not the only one in the South of Union Square Historic District that needs to be recognized and preserved based on its association with LGBTQ+ history. Just a little over a block to the south on Fifth Avenue is No. 55, home of Columbia Phonograph Recording Studios and Okeh Phonograph Recording Studios from 1926 to 1934; here, openly LGBTQ+ performers recorded their work, including blues singer Bessie Smith and jazz pianist Garland Wilson. Celebrated “New York School” poet Frank O’Hara, known for his controversial “Homosexuality” among other works, lived nearby at 90 University Place during the height of his career in the late 1950s.
Progress toward LGBTQ+ rights and recognition continued in the neighborhood in the 1970s and ’80s. The two-story 795 Broadway, for example, was the location of the Robert Samuel Gallery/Hardison Fine Arts, a trailblazing gallery that brought homoerotic photography by gay male artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar to the fore. House music innovator Junior Vasquez had a recording and mixing studio a block away at 816 Broadway; among other accomplishments, he co-founded the Sound Factory Club in Chelsea in 1989, which for six years was among the city’s hottest night spots catering to an ethnically diverse, primarily gay crowd.
The proposed South of Union Square Historic District encompasses other historic structures essential to LGBTQ+ history that are also worthy of landmark designation; read more about that history, unprotected and unrecognized by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, here. You can also take action to ensure these structures remain as part of our streetscape by signing our advocacy letter here.