SHERIDAN AND STONEWALL, GREENWICH VILLAGE

TWO very different eras of American history appear side by side in Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. 7th Avenue South was created in the 1910s by the extension of the original IRT subway through Manhattan’s lower west side from Greenwich Avenue south to what had been the junction of Varick, Clarkson and Carmine Streets, while 6th Avenue (which wasn’t given the suffix “South”) was rammed south from Carmine and Minetta Streets to Franklin and Church Streets from 1925-1928 when the new Independent Subway needed a right-of-way. Both of these street map alterations required the condemnation and demolition of countless properties, and the alterations of almost as many.

Running 7th Avenue through the Village helped create one of New York City’s most complicated intersections., but it was complex enough to begin with. Christopher and Grove meet at a sharp angle, while West 4th comes in at an angle and meets Washington Place, creating a large area with two large triangles and a smaller one formed by Grove, 7AS and West 4th.

The heroic statue depicting General Philip Henry Sheridan, by sculptor Joseph Pollia, was installed in 1936.

Sheridan’s statue…is so poorly executed one might not know the subject without his name on the plinth. The sculptor was one of those whom [Hillaire] Belloc observed, “We dream in fire and work in clay, and some of us puddle in butter with our toes.”–William Bryk, New York Press, August 16-22, 2000

General Philip Sheridan is regarded as the most dynamic and popular officer of the Union Army during the Civil War. In the summer of 1864, Sheridan oversaw the ruthless destruction of the Shenandoah Valley, eliminating the Confederate Army’s major source of food and supplies. That fall, General Sheridan rode more than twenty miles to rally his troops to victory after a surprise enemy attack.

After the war Sheridan fought in the Indian Wars in the Plains territories and was known for his harsh measures against Native Americans and brutal elimination of millions of buffalo. Sheridan denied uttering the phrase “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead” or its variant, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The phrase was, though, paraphrased in Beneath the Planet of the Apes in 1970.

The square was named in honor of Sheridan in 1896 and was a concrete traffic island, with the statue, for most of its existence. It wasn’t until 1982 that the local Sheridan Square Triangle Association successfully petitioned the Parks Department to excavate the site and install plantings. Native American artifacts were discovered during the digging.

Meanwhile, the landmarked Stonewall Inn has become a touchstone in the fight for gay rights in NYC. The original building was built around 1845 as a stables and became Bonnie’s Stone Wall in the 1930s and was established as the Stonewall Inn, a bar welcoming to gay people, in 1966. It was subject to punitive police raids for three years and on June 28, 1969, a police raid was especially violent and the Stonewall patrons fought back against the police for several hours, an incident that is recognized as the beginning of the gay liberation movement that continues to this day.

Stonewall opened under its current management in the 1990s. In 2015, the Landmarks Preservation Commission elected to protect the site, much altered from its 19th-Century origins, based on its significance in the history of gay rights and in 2016, a 7.7 acre area around the site was established as the Stonewall National Monument.

Additionally, the Gay Liberation Monument, by sculptor George Segal, commemorates the uprising that took place in June 1969 to a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, on Christopher facing the triangle. The work was installed in 1992 after ten years of bureaucratic delays and some political opposition as well. There is also a monument in Sheridan Square to Marsha Johnson (1945-1992), a transgender activist and a familiar figure in the West Village, who co-founded (with Sylvia Rivera) the group STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), which offered housing to homeless and transgender youth. Johnson is also remembered by Marsha P. Johnson State Park, along the East River between North 7th and 10th Streets in Williamsburg.

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6/27/24