Gay bar detroit michigan
Joseph Episcopal Church until Bishop Richard Emerich had the group kicked out in the summer of 1970.ĥ414 Mayfair Street, Dearborn Heights. The first meetings of the Detroit Gay Liberation Front were held at St. Hawkins Ferry, longtime Detroit Institute of Arts benefactor, had this home specially built in 1963 to showcase his art and throw some of the area’s most exclusive parties.Ĩ850 Woodward, Detroit. Long before the White Stripes got their start at the Gold Dollar, the bar hosted some of the city’s most notable drag performances of the 1960s and ‘70s, though mainly for a tourist crowd.Ĩ74 Lake Shore Road, Grosse Pointe Shores.
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The first ever meeting of Michigan’s first ever organization for homosexual people, the Detroit chapter of the Mattachine Society, was held at the Fort-Shelby Hotel on August 26, 1958.ģ127 Cass Avenue, Detroit. Jones, better known as Prophet Jones, lived in this lush mansion until financial difficulties following his 1956 morals arrests forced him to see Philadelphia’s Daddy Grace.ĥ25 West Lafayette, Detroit. The Woodward Lounge is the longest continuously run gay bar in the state, opened by William Karagas and his brothers two doors down in 1954 and re-located to its present address in 1957. (From State Historical Preservation Office.)įrom 1949 to 1980, the home bar for the toughest of blue-collar lesbians in Detroit was the Palais, affectionately known as The Pit, just a few blocks down from police headquarters.Ħ426 Woodward Avenue, Detroit. Here are a dozen worthy candidates:Ħ55 Beaubien Street, Detroit. It’s not too late to preserve other local queer sites still standing, and perhaps even slap them with historical designation and markers. Other local places of LGBTQ significance that have perished include 42½ Monroe Street in Detroit, site of the Club Frontenac, which hosted pansy and drag performances from the late 1930s until city officials forced it to close down in 1943 96 Geneva Street in Highland Park, home of Geneva House, a lesbian commune and key center of lesbian activism in Detroit in the 1970s and, perhaps most famously, 10337 Oakland in Detroit, location of Ruth Ellis’s print shop and residence where she and her partner Babe Franklin hosted house parties for lesbian and gay African American Detroiters in the 1950s. By the time the Google camera car drove by again in September 2013, all that was left of the structure was a pile of burnt lumber. The sturdy Gothic Revival can be seen, much of its Pepto Bismo color still on gleaming display, in Google Street View captures from September 2007, June 2009, and June 2011. One is the house at 2846 17th Street in Detroit, address of the Pink Palace, where writer and activist Brian McNaught held the first meetings of the Catholic group Dignity/Detroit in 1974. Too many of Detroit’s notable queer sites have already been lost.
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The collective project of commemoration is also viewed in terms of historic preservation, which ideally measures the need to save historic sites by more than their real estate value. Some business boosters tend to tie commemoration to economic revitalization, which too often equates to gentrification and displacement. The application fee runs $250, with the marker itself ranging in cost from $1,900 for a small wall-mounted plaque to $3,900 for a stand-alone marker with different text on each side. Michigan Historical Markers are expensive to have placed, however. At least not yet.ĭave Wait, who heads up the annual Motor City Pride celebration, has been interested in securing a Michigan Historical Marker for some local LGBTQ site for several years and hopes to move forward with a proposal soon. Their gay history, however, is not part of the recognition. These areas are remembered for their architectural gems or because auto barons lived there. The Indian Village and Boston-Edison neighborhoods are both on the register as well. The Palmer Park Apartment Building Historic District has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1983. That same year, the National Park Service launched its LGBTQ Heritage Initiative, inviting suggestions for historically significant queer places that deserve to be recognized. The famed Stonewall Inn, site of the 1969 uprising that helped spark a new wave of mass activism known as Gay Liberation, became one such National Monument in 2014. This week, Americans of every gender and sexuality head to visit National Parks and National Monuments for the Fourth of July. We place markers, we assign designations, we erect statues (and sometimes take them down) to show what we find important to collectively remember. Commemoration is an act of deliberate remembering.