How the Stonewall Inn Bricks Avoided the Trash

Who threw the first brick at Stonewall? The question has been argued over by generations of queer historians, with little consensus. By some accounts, either Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera—gender-nonconforming activists on the scene—hurled the first brick at police raiding the Stonewall Inn, in June, 1969, launching the riot that spurred the gay-liberation movement. (Both denied credit.) In Roland Emmerich’s 2015 film, “Stonewall,” it was a Midwestern hunk named Danny in a white T-shirt. (Fictitious.) Was it even a brick? There are reports of a construction site nearby from which rioters took bricks, but people also threw coins, cobblestones, beer bottles, and trash cans. At one point, they used a parking meter as a battering ram.

Here is the story of a Stonewall brick that can be told with relative certainty: In 2019, Kurt Kelly, one of the bar’s current owners, was up in his office; outside, construction workers were zhuzhing up the building’s façade, in anticipation of the uprising’s fiftieth anniversary. Kelly realized that the old bricks were getting thrown in a dumpster. “I’m going, They’re throwing away history!” he recalled recently. “So I grabbed my manager. I go, ‘C’mon, grab that bag!’ I got a bagful of them and threw ’em in my car.”

Kelly stored the bag of bricks in an undisclosed location. (He is anxious about theft.) He also has beams from the roof, which had caved in before he and his associates took over the place, in 2006. Kelly, who came to New York in his twenties, to pursue acting, used to take his boyfriend to the Stonewall in the nineties, for bingo nights hosted by the drag queen Kenny Dash. (“She called herself the Bingo Bitch,” he said.) Years later, he was working as a bartender at the Duplex, a piano bar down the street, when “our Budweiser rep came and said, ‘The Stonewall’s going under,’ ” he recalled. Kelly teamed up with the owners of the Duplex to buy the Stonewall, fending off a Starbucks, a jazz club, and the expansion of a nail salon next door. “It was a dump,” he said. “No one ever treated this club for its historical value. There were rat holes. Little bags of coke were all over the place.” They refurbished the interior to look like a sixties gay bar. In 2016, President Barack Obama named it a national monument.

As for the salvaged bricks, Kelly realized they had value. In November, one of them went for thirteen thousand dollars at an auction to benefit the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, which supports queer safe spaces. “I’m going to offer some to the Smithsonian,” Kelly said. Not long ago, he got a call from a patron of the American LGBTQ+ Museum, which is slated to open in 2027, in a new wing of the New York Historical. Did the Stonewall have anything museum-worthy? Kelly donated a brick, which became the first item in the museum’s collection.

“I can show you the one,” Kelly said. He was sitting in the back room at the Stonewall, just before opening. He plunked the brick on a cocktail table. It was gnarled, like something from ancient ruins, and it glowed under the disco lights as “Rhythm Is a Dancer” blasted. The surface that had faced the sidewalk was smooth; the back had a ridged perimeter and traces of the word “EMPIRE.” Subsequent brick research suggested that it was a product of the Empire Brick Co., which had a plant in Stockport, New York, in the early twentieth century and drew from the clay banks of the Hudson River. The brick likely made its way to Christopher Street in 1930, when the building, originally a nineteenth-century stable, got its brick-and-stucco façade, with arched doorways. There it remained, as the place became a Mafia-run gay bar, a Chinese restaurant, and, finally, a landmark. “To me, Stonewall means strength in numbers,” Kelly said. “We’re not giving up the fight.” He laughed and added, “We might need to fight back with this brick!”

A week later, Kelly was up at the New York Historical, for the new L.G.B.T.Q.+ museum’s breaking-ground ceremony. A jazz trio played in the lobby, as donors, activists, and local officials ate fruit skewers and mingled. “For us, it’s very much a seed of something that will grow here,” the museum’s executive director, Ben Garcia, said, of the brick. At noon, the crowd filed into the auditorium, where the brick stood onstage in a glass case. (A curator explained that it would later be documented, catalogued, and put in temperature-controlled storage.) There were speeches to come from Governor Kathy Hochul, the Manhattan borough president, and other dignitaries, but Kelly sneaked out before it began. “Believe it or not,” he said, “there’s a bar that’s gotta be run.” ♦