The East River State Park in Williamsburg will be named after Marsha P. Johnson, a leading transgender activist and woman of color who was part of the Stonewall rebellion in 1969.
Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the plans to rename the 11-acre waterfront park in honor of Johnson at the Human Rights Campaign gala this past Saturday.
"My goal has been to make New York State the leading champion in the nation for the LGBTQ community. Let New York be the state that ends discrimination, bias, intolerance, and judgmentalism against members of the LGBTQ community once and for all," Cuomo said. He added, "we are going to name the first State park after an LGBTQ person and we are going to name it after Marsha P. Johnson — an icon of the community."
Johnson was one of the central figures in the Stonewall Uprising, when people fought back against a police raid at the Stonewall Inn in an attempt by the NYPD to enforce a law that made it illegal to serve alcohol to known homosexuals. A native of Elizabeth, New Jersey, she came to New York in 1963 "with $15 and a bag of clothes" and quickly established herself as a fixture in the Greenwich Village neighborhood, eventually known as the “Mayor of Christopher Street.” She was photographed by Andy Warhol, performed with the drag performance troupe Hot Peaches and was an activist with AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP).
Johnson was the subject of one of the New York Times' Overlooked obituaries, which you can read here. Her life and the murky circumstances of her death in 1992, where she was found dead in the Hudson River, were the subject of a documentary in 2017. Following Johnson's death, Sylvia Rivera — another civil rights pioneers and transgender activist who worked closely with Johnson to found STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) — opened the Transy House in Brooklyn in her honor, which served as a shelter for transgender people through 2008. Rivera died in 2002 of liver cancer.
In 2018, First Lady Chirlane McCray launched an effort called She Built NYC to bring more female statues to the five boroughs, and last year announced that a monument to Johnson and Rivera would go up near the Stonewall Inn in 2021. This permanent monument will be among the first in the world dedicated to trans women.
