Two Transgender Activists To Be Honored With Permanent Monument In Greenwich Village

The city's monuments have long been dedicated to white men, but over the past few years that has started to change. When we first wrote about the gender disparity among the city's statues in 2009, there were around 145 male historical statues and only five female historical statues. While that remains true today, NYC's first lady Chirlane McCray launched an effort called She Built NYC in 2018 which aims to bring more female statues to the five boroughs. So far this effort has announced five more female statues around the city, and Central Park will also get its first female historical statue (featuring two women) through a separate initiative.

Even with these steps, however, the city's statues are still not representing the diversity that is celebrated here. And with that in mind, McCray is set to announce a new monument, the NY Times reports—this one for Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two civil rights pioneers and transgender activists who together founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries).

"The LGBTQ movement was portrayed very much as a white, gay male movement," McCray told the Times. "This monument counters that trend of whitewashing the history."

The planned monument will be publicly announced on Thursday in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the uprising, which was a seminal moment for gay rights. It is also part of the city’s effort to fix a glaring gender gap in public art. Statues of LGBTQ individuals are virtually nonexistent among the city’s monuments, and the city says the dedication to Johnson and Rivera will be one of the world’s first for transgender people. Ms. Johnson and Ms. Rivera were both drag performers and vibrant characters in Greenwich Village street life who worked on behalf of homeless LGBTQ youth and those affected by H.I.V./AIDS. They are also believed to have been key figures in the June 1969 Stonewall Uprising who fought police as they raided the gay bar on Christopher Street.

The permanent (and yet-to-be-commissioned) installation will be near Stonewall Inn, at Ruth Wittenberg Triangle, and the city hopes it will be up by 2021. It will reportedly cost around $750,000, which will come from $10 million allocated for new public artworks.

In 2017, a documentary came out about the life and mysterious death of Johnson, who was found dead in the Hudson River in 1992. Following Johnson's death, Rivera opened the Transy House in Brooklyn in her honor, which served as a shelter for transgender people through 2008. Rivera died in 2002 of liver cancer.

The Museum of the City of New York will be celebrating Pride Month in June, and as part of that, on June 6th, they will host an evening celebrating Johnson. At the New-York Historical Society, they will host Meeting Sylvia Rivera, which is an interactive performance featuring Summer Minerva as Sylvia Rivera.

Here are the new statues coming to NYC:

• Billie Holiday, near Queens Borough Hall, Queens
• Elizabeth Jennings Graham, in the Vanderbilt Avenue Corridor near Grand Central Terminal, Manhattan
• Dr. Helen Rodríguez Trías at St. Mary’s Park, the Bronx
• Katherine Walker at the Staten Island Ferry Landing, Staten Island
• Shirley Chisholm in Prospect Park, Brooklyn
• Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera near Stonewall Inn, Manhattan
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in Central Park, Manhattan