Women's Liberation Center

243 West 20th Street | Chelsea | built 1866

Open on the map7 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1866

    Charles E. Hartshorn designs a new firehouse for Hook and Ladder Company No. 12

    In 1866 architect Charles E. Hartshorn designed an Anglo-Italianate firehouse for the block, replacing a smaller station that had stood on the site since the early 1850s. Hook and Ladder Company No. 12 occupied it until 1967. The Landmarks Commission points to its arched window lintels, bracketed cornice, and a cast-iron entrance frame with flowers and fluted pilasters.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1968

    March

    Theater producer Bernard Gersten bids $77,000 for the empty firehouse, but the sale collapses

    After Hook and Ladder Company No. 12 left in 1967, the city declared the firehouse surplus property and put it up for auction. In March 1968 Bernard Gersten, an associate producer with the New York Shakespeare Festival, offered $77,000, planning to make it a residence. The deal fell through, and the building sat empty for about five more years, until the city let the Women's Liberation Center move in.

    Source: bedfordandbowery.com

  3. 1972

    June

    The Women's Liberation Center moves into the freezing former firehouse

    The Women's Liberation Center opened in the old firehouse in June 1972, moving from a loft building on West 22nd Street where it had also gone without heat. The group got the building from the city for $1 and switched on the lights with $100, but the firehouse was drafty and cold. A summer 1973 newsletter joked that it violated nearly every fire department regulation, and Eleanor Cooper of Lesbian Feminist Liberation was ready to shovel coal into the furnace herself.

    Source: bedfordandbowery.com

  4. 1973

    October

    A Chelsea counseling group and the Women's Liberation Center compete for the firehouse lease

    In October 1973 the Board of Estimate postponed indefinitely a decision on the firehouse, which at least temporarily halted a proposed public auction. The Women's Liberation Center had rented it as a temporary $1-a-month tenant for 16 months, with a karate and dance studio in the old firemen's dormitory. A Chelsea committee wanted the building for family counseling, drug-abuse prevention and youth recreation, and some officials urged the two groups to share it. An earlier auction had drawn a top bid of $67,000 before it was cancelled on a technicality.

    Source: The New York Times

  5. 1973

    Jean O'Leary's Lesbian Feminist Liberation sets up its office on the second floor

    Lesbian Feminist Liberation began meeting at the center in 1973 and kept its office on the second floor. Jean O'Leary had founded the group a year earlier, when it was the Lesbian Liberation Committee inside the male-dominated Gay Activists Alliance. It took up issues such as the custody fights divorced lesbian mothers faced, and pushed to give lesbians a bigger presence at political rallies and pride marches.

    Source: NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project

  6. 1973

    August 26

    Lesbian Feminist Liberation drags a lavender dinosaur to the Museum of Natural History to protest its sexism

    After planning the action at the Women's Liberation Center, members of Lesbian Feminist Liberation took on the American Museum of Natural History, which had ignored their paper of more than 100 pages on sexist displays. On August 26 they hauled a lavender papier-mache dinosaur they called Sapphasaura, over fourteen feet tall, up Broadway to Central Park West, accompanied by the Victoria Woodhull Marching Band. Demonstrators chanted "Museums hire feminists!" at the Theodore Roosevelt statue, and the Daily News covered it under a flippant headline calling them "Libbers."

    Source: gothamcenter.org

  7. 1987

    The Women's Liberation Center closes and its firehouse becomes a trades-training home for women

    The Women's Liberation Center shut down in 1987, and many of the groups that met there moved to the LGBT Community Center in the Village. One was the Lesbian Switchboard, a phone line run by volunteers that gave peer counseling, referrals and news of local events. Since the late 1980s the building has housed Nontraditional Employment for Women, a skilled-trades program, and its facade was restored in 1994.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

Further reading

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