Christopher Street Liberation Day

New York City LGBT Pride March

The Stonewall Inn in the gay village of Greenwich Village, Manhattan, site of the June 1969 Stonewall riots, the cradle of the modern gay rights movement and the catalyst for pride parades around the world.

The annual New York City LGBT Pride March, or New York City Pride March, traverses southward down Fifth Avenue and ends at Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan. The New York City Pride March rivals the Sao Paulo Gay Pride Parade as the largest pride parade in the world, attracting tens of thousands of particpants and millions of sidewalk spectators each June. The March passes by the site of the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, location of the 1969 police raid which launched the modern Gay Rights Movement.

The March, The Rally, Teaze (formerly Rapture on the River), PrideFest (the festival) and the Dance on the Pier are the main events of Pride Week in New York City LGBT Pride Week. Since 1984, Heritage of Pride (HOP) has been the producer and organizer of pride events in New York City.

Early on the morning of Saturday, 28 June 1969, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons rioted following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar at 53 Christopher Street, New York City. This riot and further protests and rioting over the following nights were the watershed moment in modern LGBT Rights Movement and the impetus for organizing LGBT pride marches on a much larger public scale.

On November 2, 1969, Craig Rodwell, his partner Fred Sargeant, Ellen Broidy, and Linda Rhodes proposed the first pride march to be held in New York City by way of a resolution at the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations (ERCHO) meeting in Philadelphia.