The Stonewall Bar, a Brief History

The Stonewall Bar in September of 1969, vacant, boarded up, and burned out from the riots.

The Stonewall Bar today

In 1967, "Fat Tony" Laurio, deeply disappointed his very pious mob boss father when he decided to open a gay bar in Greenwich Village on Christopher Street. He bought a burned out small building that had stood vacant for about 5 years. In 1967, almost all gay bars in New York state were mob owned. Since the end of Prohibition, it was illegal to serve drinks to "known sexual perverts" in the state. Gay bars were the creations of the mob and police corruption. "Fat Tony" had the means to regularly pay off the cops at the 6th Precinct.

The vacant building he bought was originally 2 small buildings. They were built in the late 19th century as stables. One was the Jefferson Livery Stable, the other was a stable run by Saks Fifth Avenue for its delivery horses. The building stood just a block from the Northern Dispensary, one of the oldest public clinics in the USA. Edgar Allen Poe was a frequent patient there. In the next block beyond that on Christopher was the site of the Lion's Head Tavern, a favorite watering hole for writers like Eugene O'Neil. In that same block, Craig Rodwell opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Book Store in 1967, one of the very first to specialize in gay literature (as opposed to pornography which Rodwell refused to sell). The poet e. e. cummings lived in that block of Christopher. Christopher Park across the street from the building was once a huge crumbling tenement that burned down in the 1900s in fire that killed 40 people. The site was turned into a small park. Across the park within sight of the buildings is 59 Grove Street where the great revolutionary Thomas Paine died.

The two buildings were combined and turned into a tavern in the early 1920s. It was called "Bonnie's Stone Wall" and may have served a lesbian clientele. The name may have been code. There was a very popular lesbian novel at the time by an anonymous author titled The Stone Wall. During Prohibition, the Stone Wall was a "tea room," a bar that served no liquor, but usually kept a speakeasy in the basement or in back. In the 1940s the Stonewall Inn was a thriving respectable restaurant hosting wedding and retirement parties. By 1960, the restaurant burned down, and the building stood vacant as the surrounding neighborhood went into decline.
The Stonewall was too far west to cash in on the Beat culture that was centered on 8th street. But, it was perfectly situated for a gay male clientele. By the early 1960s, Greenwich Avenue, a block away, was major cruising area. The Stonewall was right next to an important subway stop where gay men arrived in the neighborhood.

By the time the Stonewall opened in 1967, gay night life had already endured 3 years of a police crackdown that began with the New York World's Fair of 1964 - 1965, and continued as a politically popular campaign to "clean up" Greenwich Village and make it more tourist and business friendly. The campaign only pushed the Village's gay night life deeper into mob control, and lined the pockets of police captains willing to look the other way for the right price.

The major source for this short history is David Carter's splendid history of the Stonewall riots, Stonewall, The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, with a little help from George Chauncey's Gay New York, Gender Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890 - 1940.