Brief History of Christopher Street  

March 29th, 1993  

        Stonewall just didn't happen where it did in Manhattan.  The stores, bars and apartment buildings around Sheridan Square caused the stand off to happen where it did.  The West Village was the source for piano bar entertainment back in the late 1940's.  Maries Crisis, Grove Street, and The Duplex were all just across the street from another very old bar the Lion's Head which is just next to the wall that started Stonewall. The Gay Landmark bookstore is on Christopher and Hudson and was there 25 years ago, long before the street was declared Gay.  The man who started Stonewall was called "Black Madonna, Black Marsha".  He was a popular drag queen and always a fixture on the Street.  He started it and he was killed down by the pier at the foot of Christopher just this last Summer.  His body was found floating in the river.  

      Now in Sheridan Square you have the statues to mark Stonewall.  There was a commotion this last summer when the statues were dedicated because the statues were done by a non-gay artist.  The statues are life casts of two men together standing and two women together sitting.  There is no plague marking the title or artist.  I wondered why the statues do not get any graffiti on them.  I think the city painted the statues with subway car paint, the stuff that you can remove all graffiti from.  Sometimes there's a hat on one of them and another is holding something.  

     Sheridan Square is the center of the West Village.  To mark the spot is Village Cigars and the two billboards above it.  You can always tell what year it is by the billboards.  In 1976 there was a billboard of "Hibiscus and the Screaming Violets".  Hibiscus was his stage name but he was the consummate entertainer in the vein of Voquing today.  His day name was George Harris and it was he who was seen putting the flower into the soldiers gun during the peace rally in Washington in the seventies.  George was a flamboyant entertainer at heart, raised by two parents, who were also entertainers, along with five other siblings.  They all lived in a classic ten by forty tenement apartment.  Each child had a bunk along one wall about two thirds the way up that they decorated.  

     George was one of the first to die of aids.  Hibiscus and the Screaming Violets was his last production.  There was recently a play written about his life.  His brothers and sisters wrote,  produced it and it played at La Mamma's this last year.  

     At the foot of Christopher is a fenced in concrete dock. It used to be a nice dock with a open view but now it is sterile with a chain link fence around it, like a holding cage for people.  Anyone can go there but next to it going uptown is a falling down old wood pier.  It's fence in but their is always one of the son gods that comes down with the wire clippers to cut the fence everyday and then all the men go out. People go out there to be naked.  That goes on all summer long.  The block association does not want this to go on so it wires up the fence every night.  There used to be some empty buildings on the next pier also going uptown.  It was in those buildings that Tennessee Williams  lived in the fifties.  The building always was a place for drifters to live in and tricks to be had.  

     I went swimming at the end of the pier this last summer.  It was the first time in fifteen years living there.  I didn't but my head under water and took a shower afterwards!  The water seemed clear.  It's a whole lot better than it was except for the heavy metals.  The whole edge along the river used to be a nice railing but it has fallen into disrepair and has been replaced by a road barrier.  They are slowly repairing the rivers edge.  Starting in Wall Street and Battery City the waterfront is undergoing a revitalization.  The vitalization has reached just below Christopher Street Pier to the air ducts of the Holland Tunnel.  They have laid in a beautiful park around the ducts.  The West side highway, a six lane roadway, travels the length of the West side.  Between the highway and the waters edge is about hundred feet.  A parking lot used to be the use for this space before the city gave it back to the pedestrians.  It used to be the only free unrestricted place in the city to park your car.  Now it is a open space where they have a summer market.  It is a real bizarre.  Everybody comes in with their stuff and the fair sort of lends itself to local people putting up their wares. The feeling is real folksy.  Of course that is because of regulation on who gets to come in.  

     Every year they have the Gay dance on the nice pier during Gay Pride Week.  They really pack them in for that event.  There is a little street called Weehawken and it turns into the back room during the festival.  It is a little street running three hundred feet from Christopher St. to the next street uptown.  Lots of behavior going on and it hasn't changed much since aids.  The guys don't seen to care at all.  The only comment you get is how could those men be doing that.  Blow jobs, no rubbers, the whole shi bang.  Booths are set up on the street and it becomes rather dark on that street.  I think it's mostly a golden shower place during the fair.  I wouldn't doubt that there was a guy laying along the wall being pissed on.  I didn't see it. Surly there was nothing there that doesn't happen in the bedroom of the straight world and since it's a man's world, men do it outside.  

 The Duplex, a piano bar, is in a new place now.  It was on Grove Street next to Maries Crisis but it moved to a new location in a triangle building formed by 7th Avenue and Christopher Street just across from Sheridan Square.  A old kiosks used to be there.  The building started around 1986 took forever to build probably because of the historical codes for buildings in the district.  Across the street in front of Village Cigars is a plaque in the sidewalk that makes mention that this spot has never been given to the city.  This probably means that you don't have to abided by the building codes.  

     The park marking Sheridan Square wasn't always like it is now.  In the recent past the place was quite seedy.  The whole park has been rebuilt even to the newly laid brick sidewalks and state of the art benches that are configured to not allow you to sleep on them.  They put benches in the center and lock the gate at night occasionally.  It has been restored to the old way.  It looks old but it wasn't like that, there was a old falling down fence and the sidewalks were concrete.  

     The neighborhood is slowly reverting back to a upscale area where every shop has a shop keeper.  It used to be that way in the late forties and early fifties.  Then it went into slow period of decline because of families moving out to the suburbs which made it really cheap to rent apartments.  You could change your apartment every year, nobody locked their doors.  Artists had taken over.  Artists painted on the street. Drug store Johnnies where there.  Slowly it was the late fifties and the  beat nicks were there. Living was easy.  Nobody wanted to live there because all the hippies were there.  Washington Square Park bred the folk song.  Love was free.  New York University was buying up all the buildings.  It was a college neighborhood.  

     Most of the shops were thrift stores.  Local people selling whatever they had.  The village reached it's low point financially and its high point fun wise.  Flower power was Queen.  The Lindsey administration had gone out and the city was broke.  Because of government spending, rents and living rose all throughout the eighties, bringing the same apartment that was $150 in 1976 to $700 in 1993. Local shop keepers were driven out because of the rising rents.  Only the high priced,  high volume stores and franchised stores could survive.  Upscale people started moving in because the Village was the most desirable place to live in the city and all the good apartment were taken mid-town.  More and more buildings were redone to take advantage of the higher rents.  

     With the upscale tenants comes a stronger block association and that means Christopher Street will be tamed down.  With people paying eight hundred dollars for a small apartment right on the river don't want to contend with a large group of gay men drinking beer from paper bags and milling about.  The people living on Christopher Street didn't have anything to do with its becoming the gay street.  At first it was hard to accept getting spit at and harassed being a straight couple walking down Christopher Street.  Then people started accepting one another which started getting a more younger gay crowd.  But that led to the poorer gay men spending more and more time milling about on the street.  Voguing started then from boys standing around dishing one another.  Black Madonna was murdered because of this phenomenon.  The pier just got too dangerous.  Christopher Street is now really ethic gay New York and it's going to stay that way.