A Short History of the Christopher Street Pier: “Place-making” and Displacement

Today the Christopher Street Pier, also known as Pier 45, is part of Hudson River Park, established in 1998. The park serves as an urban recreational public space where visitors can enjoy over four miles of waterfront views of the Hudson River. Located at the intersection of West Street and West 10th Street, the Christopher Street Pier has long been an important part of the West Village—New York’s premier queer neighborhood. It was and is known as a haven where queer folks congregate—today it is also a place for enjoying live music, participating in exercise classes, and sunbathing on the perfectly manicured “green beach” (Hudson River Park, Pier 45). This park is the attraction it is today because of the Hudson River Park Act, legislation for a revitalization project that was signed into law by Governor George E. Pataki in 1998. The act established the Hudson River Park Trust, which was charged with the task of reimagining the city’s post-industrial waterfront. The pier was originally an industrial area and a site of shipping terminals and ports, but it became obsolete as the maritime industry changed. Planners set out with the goal of enhancing “the ability of New Yorkers to enjoy the Hudson river… promote the health, safety, and welfare of the people of the state; increase the quality of life in the adjoining community and the state as a whole; help alleviate the blighted, unhealthy, unsanitary, and dangerous conditions that characterize much of the area; and boost tourism and stimulate the economy.” The project began with the renovation of the Christopher Street Pier, which was shut down for construction from 2001 to 2003, when the first completed segment was opened up to the public.

Before the pier and surrounding park became a recreational paradise, the area was home to a diverse community of queers and, importantly, not only White cisgendered gay men. It was a place for queers of color, transgender folks, drag queens, and houseless queer youth. The description in the Hudson River Park Act of the area as“blighted, unhealthy, unsanitary, and dangerous” clearly referenced that community, and it was the very existence of that community on the piers in the 1990s that inspired the local government to establish the Hudson River Park Act. that the area was This is evidence of the White hetero gaze of people with power who were unable to recognize the importance of the people living on the pier. Rather than collaborating to “promote the health, safety, and welfare” of the people who called the area home, the trust actively worked to push them out, and in the process of “reimagining” the area, planners did not address the presence or needs of the queer community who made homes on the pier. Instead, developers closed the pier, and then when it reopened the city instituted a 1:00 a.m. curfew that made it illegal for the queer and unhoused community to be on the pier—their home—“after hours.” In addition, those responsible for “reimagining” the pier increased police presence, which in turn created increased threat and dangerous experiences for people of color, trans folks, sex workers, and houseless folks in their long-held home. To solidify this state-sanctioned erasure, on the Hudson River Park website, the long history of the queer community was omitted from the history of the area that the trust published as part of its documentation of the process of gentrification. Pier Kids invites us to become conscious of what informs how we see who we see; to interrogate an affluent gaze, a White gaze, and a heteronormative gaze; and to push ourselves truly to see the brilliance and strength of unhoused queers of color successfully supporting one another in a world that persistently failed them.

Pier Kids: Christopher Street’s Community

Most major milestones for LGBTQIA+ equality have happened in the past two decades. It became legal for people of the same sex to engage in sexual acts after the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003. Since then there have been many major wins for LGBTQIA+ rights, for example the repeal in 2010 of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which banned LGBTQIA+ from serving in the armed forces; and, as recently as 2015 the Supreme Court decision to grant same-sex couples the right to marriage. However, for decades before this period of transition homophobia was government sanctioned and discrimination was legally acceptable. For LGBTQIA+ people, this meant that the state deemed them unworthy of protection and determined differentiated degrees of danger and precarity as a part of queer life. To survive while living their truths, members of queer communities did what those in so many disenfranchised communities had done before them—they relied on community support for their survival. As we see in Pier Kids, in the West Village, and specifically on the Christopher Street Pier, there is a long history of this radical community care. In the face of police brutality and government sanctioned eradication, the marginalized queers of Christopher Street supported, celebrated, and created family with each other.

The Stonewall Riots were a multi-day resistance against the constant brutality that queers in New York faced at the hands of police. This event would be commemorated across the nation as the inciting incident of the LGBTQIA+ movement for equality. In a patterned practice of whitewashing that is common in U.S. history, Black and Brown trans folks, drag queens, and houseless people who led this resistance were erased from the national narrative in order to further the movement. Despite this erasure, the riots demonstrated community power that brought a deeper sense of safety and security to the marginalized queers in the area. In the subsequent years, Christopher Street, and especially the Christopher Street Pier, came to be a home where queers all across the identity spectrum could find community and support.

Two of the most notable queers to have lived on the pier were queer ancestors, activists, and icons Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Recognizing the need for support in their own lives, they started the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) project in 1970 in hopes of creating housing, education, and support “for the street gay people, the street homeless people and anybody that needed help at that time,” according to Rivera. Rivera was also a member of the Gay Liberation Front and later joined the Young Lords Party, an organization of revolutionary Puerto Rican youth. The spirit of understanding that is sustained within radical communities of people who protect one another is the same spirit that we see manifest and evolving in Pier Kids.

Since queer community resistance was happening under the larger project of state-sanctioned displacement, marginalization, and erasure, the stories of those on the frontlines was rarely documented in popular media. Alvin Baltrop, a Black gay war veteran, hung around the pier to document, photograph, and create an archive of life, love, everydayness, and survival on the Christopher Street Pier.

Having found kinship, friendship, and community on the pier, Baltrop experienced the type of marginalization that was common to queers of color at the time, and his work was only recognized by the art world as valuable after his death. In an essay on Baltrop’s life and work, Osa Atoe asks, “Why is a Black, poor, queer artist’s work only valuable after he is dead?” (Colorlines, 2009). This legacy makes Pier Kids even more powerful. It is a documentary archive that is bringing the life of the pier made possible by the lives of people who call it home into the public sphere. Pier Kids gifts us all access to learn, to celebrate, to love without judgment, and, importantly, to witness the dynamic and creative lives of people in community, choosing family, and protecting one another.

An Overview of Houselessness in America

A report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness shows that in 2020 there were 580,466 people experiencing houselessness in America, with a disproportionate percentage of those experiencing houselessness being Black (39%) and Latinx (23%), highlighting systemic racism and structural impacts of poverty and rising housing costs in every American city. Growing momentum across the country for the rights of the unhoused, and increasing recognition of housing as a human right, has been met with increased criminalization of homelessness. According to the National Homelessness Law Center, 187 American cities increased laws that effectively criminalize homelessness between 2006 and 2019. Their findings reflect an overall 92% increase in camping bans, 78% increase in bans on sitting or lying in public spaces, a 103% increase in laws against panhandling, and a 213% increase in criminalization of living in vehicles. This attempt to hide the reality of houseless folks from others in public spaces is often fueled by the common narrative that folks living on the streets are lazy and incapable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. This narrative allows people to hide from the truth that houselessness is, in fact, a byproduct of capitalism, a system that was built on and still relies upon systemic inequality that does not readily supply opportunities for advancement to marginalized people. This narrative also keeps the blame on the folks living on the streets, instead of attempting to examine critically the systems keeping them there, such as the service providers, policies, and police who are serving them inadequately.

Youth (ages 13 to 25) are one of the most at risk populations living on the streets. It is estimated that there are 41,000 youth forced to live on the streets in the United States, of which about 1 in 4 are members of the LGBTQIA+ community. In a country where most major milestones for LGBTQIA+ equality happened in the past 20 years, acceptance of the queer identity is still new. Acoording to numerous studies on unhoused queer youth, this is one of the primary reasons that so many queer youth are unhoused—they have been kicked out or run away from their unaccepting homes. When seeking support services, members of this community face even more challenges due to discrimination, lack of training, and a lack of intentional services provided to them. This is especially true for people of the trans experience. According to a study done by theNational Center for Transgender Equity (NCTE) of the trans folks who attempted to access shelters, 29% were turned away altogether, 42% were forced to stay in facilities designated for the wrong gender, and others encountered a hostile environment; additionally, 55% reported being harassed, 25% were physically assaulted, and 22% were sexually assaulted.

Choosing to live your truth should not come at the cost of shelter and safety, and yet that is the reality for many in the LGBTQIA+ community. Harm is constant for queers living on the streets, and a key to mitigating this is to include people who are part of the LGBTQIA+ community in the conversations and decision-making spaces for policies and services development and fund queer-led organizations doing the work to support unhoused folks in creating the lives they want for themselves.

Sex Work as Real Work and the Rights of Workers

The sex industry is one of the most controversial and dangerous industries in the world, and one to which many street kids, especially queer kids who are unhoused, find themselves turning for survival. Joining the sex trade is often not a choice, but a form of economic coercion, meaning that often sex work is the most viable option for earning a living. In New York City, queer kids are seven or eight times more likely to engage in the sex trade than their cisgender peers. In the film a number of pier kids speak to how sex work helps them earn money to meet their daily needs. As Jehovy says, “If you are broke and you go down to work the streets, you cannot leave without money.”

But the sex trade comes with a lot of its own dangers. In the United States, it is criminalized in every state except Nevada, where regulated brothels are legal. The consequences of this criminalization are numerous: workers in the industry often face physical violence from clients and police; their rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections are heightened; and police records hinder alternative employment opportunities and limit housing options. Coupled with stigma, and discrimination, sex trade workers face many layers of violence, which often goes unchecked because policies and practices penalize the sex trade, often to the detriment of the health and safety of the individuals engaging in the work.

The movement for decriminalization in the United States began in the 1970s as an outgrowth of the second wave feminist movement. The inception of the first prostitutes’ rights groups began with organizations like COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) and FLOPS (Friends and Lovers of Prostitutes). In the decades since, there have continued to be major efforts to educate the public, humanize prostitutes by adopting the term “sex worker,” and legitimize the profession. These efforts have led to major world organizations like the World Health Organization, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the American Civil Liberties Union creating policies for and publicly endorsing decriminalization of sex work as a human right and a public health imperative.

In New York City, the long fought effort for decriminalization has ushered in change over the years. In 1976, a law was put in place that allowed police to ticket and arrest all people who appeared to be loitering for the purpose of engaging in prostitution. It has since become known, colloquially, as the “Walking While Trans” law due to the disproportionate targeting of trans folks, specifically trans folks of color. The vagueness of the law allowed police to target anyone they deemed suspicious, which, fueled by gender and racial profiling, led to police targeting rans folks, specifically trans folks of color. In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the efforts of grassroots organizations like DecrimNY and Make the Road NY coupled with the momentum of the Black Trans Lives Matter movement in New York City led to the repeal of this law in February 2021. This move opened the way for the landmark decision made later that year by district attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. to declare that the city would no longer prosecute prostitution and unlicensed massage. With this, he moved to dismiss 914 open cases for the same charges and dismiss the 5,080 cases charged under the Walking While Trans law. After the dismissal, Vance spoke to what drove the state’s shift in approach: “Over the last decade we’ve learned from those with lived experience, and from our own experience on the ground: Criminally prosecuting prostitution does not make us safer and, too often, achieves the opposite result by further marginalizing vulnerable New Yorkers.” This moment signaled a shift in the decriminalization movement across the United States, and a number of states across the country are poised to follow suit.

In the face of the global shift to support the decriminalization movement, a new anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal model guided by indigenous feminists has emerged. The Bodies Back model, developed by AF3IRM Hawai’i—a grassroots organization led by Native Hawaiian, BIPOC, queer, and gender diverse women in the trade—is a policy model for non-carceral abolition of the sex trade. This model demands a critical analysis of the systems of violence and oppression that create and maintain the sex trade. Arguably the two most notable accomplishments of the decriminalization movement are the near global adoption of “sex work” as a term meant to center the person over the trade, and the developing legal recognition of sex workers. Within the Bodies Back movement, all work is seen as forced within a capitalist system. Bodies Back affirms that capitalism allows people to use their economic power to gain access to the bodies of others, in effect bypassing consent because of a prostituting person's need to survive. Additionally, this model recognizes that the term “sex work” can function as a colonial tool that may diminish the innate power differential experienced by those who turn to the sex trade for survival within a capitalist society. The legal recognition of prostitution is similarly recognized as a tool that preserves the commodification of people (as legally determined) and continues to rely on a narrative that blames and shames sex workers without critiquing systemic sexism, sex buyers, and the colonial state. The Bodies Back model calls for a number of key things that push against what have been identified as “successes'' within the capitalist framing:

1. Decriminalize all people who are hired to provide sexual acts.
2. Abolish the notion of sex as an industry and recognize sex as personal, not state-regulated.
3. Reverse the unequal power between buyers and the bought by only decriminalizing prostituting people, expropriating and redistributing wealth from exploiters to prostituting people, and having the government interrupt the systems of exploitation by providing resources to BIPOC folks.
4. Fight for policy change to end LGBTQ discrimination.
5. Focus on giving BIPOC the same freedom to exit the sex industry as bourgeois White women.
6. Provide comprehensive sex education that is gender-affirming and gender justice oriented and create public awareness campaigns against rape culture that explicitly denormalize sex buying and normalize enthusiastic consent.
7. Instate government interventions that interrupt the systems of exploitation. For example, establishing accountability measures as an alternative to prisons, such as a 50-week minimum men’s accountability program rooted in empathy building, self-love, gender based awareness training, and critical race theory; also create family accountability processes.

The sex trade is built from a system of domination and to create safety for the workers in this trade this model requires a balancing of access, resources, education, and power.