That's the Stonewall Inn. Small bar, brick facade, rainbow flags. You already know what happened here. But you probably don't know how it happened, and the details matter.
Start with this: the Stonewall Inn was owned by the Mafia. Specifically, the Genovese crime family. They bought the building for about three thousand five hundred dollars, converted it from a restaurant into a bar, and ran it as a cash operation. There was no running water behind the bar — the glasses were rinsed in tubs of standing water that were rarely changed. The place was filthy. And it was one of the only bars in New York where gay people could gather openly.
That's because the Mob didn't care who you loved. They cared about money. The Genovese family made money two ways — from the bar itself, and from blackmail. Closeted patrons, especially those with professional careers, were identified and extorted. Pay up or we tell your employer. It was a protection racket run inside the only place where people felt pr
otected.
The police were in on it too. The bar paid twelve hundred to eighteen hundred dollars a week in bribes — this was the late sixties — and in exchange, cops looked the other way. When a raid was coming, the police would tip off the bar in advance so the owners could stash the good liquor and everyone could act surprised.
Then, on June twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-nine, the system broke.
