The NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project held multiple events focusing on lesbian history on June 16 and 17, including a special tribute to the late Polish-Jewish immigrant Eve Adams, who owned a gay and lesbian tearoom hangout in the 1920s but was entrapped and arrested by New York City police, deported, and sent to her death at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Ken Lustbader and Amanda Davis of the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project began on June 16 with their tour of important lesbian sites in Greenwich Village.
The tour started with a stop at the home of the oldest black lesbian organization, the Black Lesbian Caucus, housed at the rectory of the progressive United Methodist Church.
The tour went on to include 150 West Fourth Street, which housed both the Mad Hatter before WWII and the Pony Stable Inn during the reactionary ’50s. From there, a short walk led to Sheridan Square, where Billie Holiday first performed the powerful and shocking “Strange Fruit” at Café Society.
A stop at 129 MacDougal Street, which is now La Lanterna, began the fascinating story of Eve Adams, who was arrested in 1926. The important and timely story of Eve Adams was fully told with the help of author Jonathan Ned Katz the following day on June 17.
Adams was arrested by the NYPD at her tearoom on June 17, 1926 — 100 years to the day before the LGBTQ Historic Sites Project’s event — and was later convicted on charges of obscenity due to her book, “Lesbian Love,” and attempting “sapphism” when women police officers set out to entrap her. She was deported to Poland the following year, and she was arrested at her home in Nazi-occupied Nice, France, on Dec. 7, 1943. From there, she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was killed.
As the LGBTQ Historic Sites Project told Adams’ story, out Manhattan Borough President Hoylman-Sigal held up two letters he delivered — one to the mayor asking the city to formally acknowledge that her conviction was unjust and one the governor seeking a posthumous pardon.
See some photos of both events below:
