Journey To The Christopher St. Pier & Loss of Queer Spaces

The growing gentrification of many of America’s largest cities is often lamented as the death of culture, character and community in many neighborhoods formerly home to the marginalized, the poor and working class, and people of color. Gay neighborhoods like New York City’s West Village have historically been safe havens and places of refuge for LGBTQ folks, and in particular the stretch of Christopher St. from the infamous Stonewall Inn leading across the West Side Highway to the Christopher St. Pier has seen multiple generations of queer people sashay past the bars, sex shops, and queer friendly businesses.

As each winter gives way to warmer temperatures and the first hot days of summer appear, LGBTQ folks have long flocked to the Village to congregate, socialize, sunbathe, dance and birth a new generation of queens. For many LGBTQ New Yorkers, journeying to the Village and the Pier was a rite of passage and often their first exposure to a social environment where they were free to be openly queer. Over the last two decades, rising rents have pushed many of those historic businesses out and driven working class queer folks from the neighborhood, while the renovation of the Pier and requests of heightened police presence from residents has drastically changed one of the city’s most notorious social spaces for often predominantly LGBTQ people of color.

Legendary NYC drag queen performer and comedian Harmonica Sunbeam recalls her first pilgrimage to the Village and the Pier, “When I first went you could park your car on the Pier and hangout. It never closed and the cops didn’t even cross the highway. You had nude sunbathers during the day and the ballroom crowd at night.” She began frequenting the Pier in  high school after being introduced to the scene by an older friend and soon became a guide herself. In those pre-internet, pre-social media days, knowledge of these queer safe spaces was spread by word of mouth or by physically leading the way. “I would see many a vogue battle which got me genuinely intrigued with Ballroom,” she continues, “I saw a few girls get knocked for mouthing off to the wrong people. The rats at the pier were bold as fuck. They would come up to you eating a slice and demand half or threaten to jump you.”

As highlighted in the seminal documentary Paris Is Burning, the Pier was a vital element of the Ballroom scene and a social space for countless members of the Ballroom community. Freddie Labeija, who first visited the Pier in 1988 and would eventually come to the Pier on a nearly daily basis, recalls the vibrant energy and feeling of community, “There was a jeep that parked on the Pier with that speaker pumping the beats that you could hear on the whole stretch, and the kids would vogue down. The people I met on the Pier showed me hospitality.”

Angelica Torres, who first visited the Pier in 2001 at the age of 15, experienced a cultural awakening. “When we finally arrived at the Piers, it was like sensory overload! The view was of course breathtaking, especially on a warm summer day despite the broken down appearance. It certainly wasn’t the well kept, renovated Pier that it is today but regardless it had charm, color and community. I recall lots of queer folks of all colors and creeds voguing everywhere, sashaying down the streets as if they were walking on a runway during New York Fashion Week, a significant amount of LGBTQ homeless kids, trans women of color…” The intermingling of different members of the LGBTQ community, the jovial atmosphere and the normalization of sexuality and sexual freedom allowed many to experience their queerness without shame or fear, often for the first time. “All in all, it felt like home. It felt like one of the few spaces in New York City that I could just be present and feel comfortable in my own skin without judgement or prejudice for my gender identity.”

Arturo Mugler

G Xtravaganza

Freddie Labeija

As is the nature of big cities, change is inevitable, and those who frequented the Pier in the 1980s, 90s and even early 2000s all agree that the neighborhood and the Pier itself have changed drastically. Not just in the sense of the physical renovations to the landscape, but in atmosphere as well. “It’s basically crickets now,” observed G Xtravaganza, who has seen a tremendous change even from his first visit to the Pier in 2005. “No one really goes down to the Christopher St. Pier and when they do it’s a small clique just to reminisce and maybe smoke. Even all the small shops and pizza corners are all but gone. It doesn’t have any flavor or liveliness now. Nobody is running to the Pier to be ‘seen’ or to carry on.” Arturo Mugler, who started hanging out at the Pier with friends in the late 1990s, agrees. “It’s no longer for us, it’s all about the residents.” Indeed, an uptick in noise complaints to police from residents in the luxury condos that now line the Westside Highway, neighborhood advocates who have pushed for more stringent enforcement of the Pier’s curfew, and the pushback from activists who still see the Pier as a necessary safe space for some of the city’s most marginalized have now all become a part of the ever shifting history of the storied gay neighborhood and that stretch of Pier looking across the Hudson. While some see the Village and Pier as fading, there are movements to preserve them as important queer spaces. Today one of the only curated  experiences for QTPOC youth in NYC is the Youth Pride Fest, hosted by The Hetrick Martin Institute and The Kiki Coalition, which offers a celebration specifically for youth and young adults that includes a festival and a ball on the Pier.

As the need for LGBTQ spaces has shifted with mainstream culture’s slow but growing acceptance of queer lives, and as the internet provides new kinds of social spaces for us, there is a sense of loss with the demise of each legacy business, or bar or club, or gathering space like the infamous Pier, where so much LGBTQ history has taken place. While social media, chat forums and dating/hook-up apps appear on the surface to make the need for physical safe spaces seem less necessary, many lament the loss of community that can arise from diverse groups of LGBTQ folks congregating and existing together in real life, away from the glow of computer and smartphone screens. Others see the commodification of LGBTQ lives by the mainstream simultaneously existing as social/cultural progress and a sort of diluting of the vibrancy of queer experiences. On the current state of the Village and the Pier, Angelica Torres explains, “It lacks the originality, charm and sense of LGBTQ+ community that it used to garner. What once was a safe haven for our community turned into a bunch of Starbucks shops, Equinox gyms, sushi restaurants and frat boy bars. There’s nowhere near as many gay & lesbian bars in the area as there used to be. And while there’s still a significant LGBTQ+ presence on the Piers, for lack of a better phrase, it feels like a white washed, watered down version of what the Piers used to be. It’s quite sad because what once was a safe refuge for us feels as though it’s been taken away from us.” As a community the need for a preservation of our history, in particular the history of the spaces LGBTQ folks claimed, created and flourished,  is vital to educating younger generations on where we’ve been, what we’ve endured to enjoy some of the freedoms we take for granted today, and to engender a continuation of that frenetic and irrepressible spirit that makes us special. “I personally don’t go down that way too often anymore because I’d rather keep my real memories of the Pier with me,” says Harmonica Sunbeam, “The days of the village belonging to us are gone. We can only share the stories of the place where we used to be free.”

Photo: Kiki Coalition