Pridefest to make historic move to Chelsea

Volume One, Issue 25, March 9 - 15, 2007

By Chris Lombardi

It became official Wednesday night: Pridefest is coming to Chelsea.

A quiet highlight of Community Board 4’s general meeting at the Fulton Center this week was the full board’s unanimous approval of Pridefest, a highlight of Gay Pride Weekend, moving this June to Eighth Avenue between 14th and 23rd Streets, marking a historic, 37-year shift for the festival away from the West Village’s Christopher Street, site of the 1969 Stonewall riots that helped birth the gay rights movement.

Of courts, the two once seemed inseparable: In 1994, the 25th anniversary of Stonewall, the New York Times warned cheerfully, “If you think getting around New York City on a holiday weekend or the week before Christmas is madness, just wait.” In 2003, writer James Pergola called Pridefest “perhaps the only event which makes the streets of New York City’s Greenwich Village look like the French Quarter at Mardi Gras.”

But to Heritage of Pride (HOP), which runs Pride Week events and has been called the “wise emcee” of local gay rights groups by the Village Voice, Pridefest’s Village location had become more like recent sadder New Orleans stories, with 500,000 people trying to cram into narrow Village streets.

“It was getting dangerous,” said Brian O’Dell, HOP’s executive director, in a phone conversation last week.

HOP’s official statement lists some of the Village location’s drawbacks: “the darkness, windiness, grubby and pot-holed paving, lack of gay bars and restaurants for all, and the inaccessibility of public transportation for Seniors and the disabled.” After a summit last fall, HOP made two decisions that may seem obvious in retrospect: Move Pridefest to Saturday, June 24, so it is not competing with the historic Gay Pride march down Fifth Avenue, and take Pridefest to where the bars are, where many more in the community live these days, and where there’s more room, to boot.

Chelsea, of course.

But the idea to move the festival meant getting through the city’s woolly approval processes, not easy given the 10-year-old moratorium on new street fairs and the bad taste left in many people’s mouths by the perpetual, unchanging commercial street fair, with its socks and massage tables and smoke-filled outdoor sausage grills. But after getting certified as an existing street fair by the Mayor’s Office and presenting its innovative plan for a “smoke-free” fair—with booths in the center facing the street and stage events co-planned with the Chelsea Cultural Partnership—CB4’s Transportation Planning Committee relented, and HOP’s O’Dell celebrated.

Neither HOP nor other gay rights advocates contacted by Chelsea Now shed many tears for the loss of the West Village location, despite its historic roots.

“[The change] reflects how our community is changing, and where our community lives,” said Joe Tarver of Empire State Pride Agenda, which itself moved from Little West 12th Street to its Chelsea office on 22nd Street a few years back. “The Village has been kind of the symbolic center of the gay community, the sentimental center, but even that had migrated to Chelsea.”

Tarver also applaud’s Pridefest’s switch to a stand-alone Saturday event, saying that the logistics of staffing a booth on the same day as the March were getting harder and harder each year. “We had to rent two vans for all our stuff, on two separate days.” It also proved difficult standing on cobblestone for nine hours. On Eighth Avenue, an equally well-known gay destination, “We’ll get our message out to a lot more people,” he said.

Other local Chelsea groups, like Dance Theater Workshop and the Rubin Museum, were also enthusiastic about being part of the day. “This is our community, too,” said Karen Kedmey, spokesperson for the Rubin Museum, which wrote a letter to C.B. 4 on behalf of HOP’s proposal. The museum’s exhibits, planned long before, will feature on Pride Weekend a series of images of the Dalai Lama by contemporary artists—an image of welcome perhaps appropriate to the day.

“Chelsea’s so diverse,” said Kedmey. “The Museum is proud to be part of the festival, as it gets a little closer to us.”