Travels with the WPA State Guides: Sheridan Square and the Stonewall Inn

The American Guide Series, produced by the Federal Writers’ Project, is one of the most well-known WPA projects. Written as a collection of travel guides, the series included suggested tour routes as well as essays on the history and culture of each U.S. state and territory. Major U.S. cities and several regions were also given their own separate guidebooks.  

The state guides give a fascinating snapshot of American life in the 1930s. Written in a lively and approachable style, they detail and celebrate the rich diversity that our country displayed at that time. The writers’ enthusiasm is infectious and their guide is as much fun to read today as it must have been for travelers in the 1930s.  

Several historians have written about the American Guide Series over the past 80 years, but no one, to my knowledge, has used them as current-day travel guides. That is just what I set out to do. I am an American historian, art photographer, and enthusiastic traveler. I have read each of these guides. I love them for their wonderful enthusiasm and their curiosity about every aspect of regional life—from food, to linguistics, to folklore, to statistics, to geography, to environment, to history—and especially for their liberal attitudes and respect for diversity. In this series, I will be posting photo essays and articles based upon tours recommended in the guides.

Fern L. Nesson




 Sheridan Square, in the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village was named for General Philip Sheridan, a Northern general in the Civil War. The Cavalry Corps of the Army of the Potomac, he defeated Confederates in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864 and then pursued Robert E. Lee, forcing him to surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865.

After his death in 1888, New York city named the square in his honor.  “At the northeast end is a small park, containing a bronze statue of General Sheridan […]  erected in 1936.” (New York City Guide, p. 141) It’s a strange spot for a Civil War tribute to a now all but forgotten army officer. But the Square has taken on great significance since 1969. It is now a place of pilgrimage.

The Stonewall Inn, an old dive bar, sits directly across from the Square on Christopher Street. In the 1960s it became a popular gay bar. Throughout the decade, police raids were common; customarily the police would enter, separate dancing couples, collect a cash payoff and leave.

But on June 28, 1969, nine police officers from the Vice Squad, Public Morals Division, entered the bar, arrested some of the patrons and seized some liquor. By the time the patrol wagons had arrived to transport the arrestees, a crowd of patrons has begun to grow in the square. When the police attempted to place a handcuffed woman into a van, she shouted to the crowd “Why don’t you guys do something?” An officer picked her up and heaved her into the wagon, whereupon the crowd erupted in protest.

The officers called for back-up from the Tactical Police Force (TPF) who formed a phalanx and cleared the street, ending the protest but the resistance to police harassment was path-breaking and liberating. It became a great source of pride in the LGBTQ community and led to the first gay pride parades in the United States.

In 2000, both the Stonewall Inn and Sheridan Square were  declared National Historic Landmarks and the Square is now maintained by the National Park Service. Visitors come mostly for the Rainbow flags and the statues commemorating Stonewall but, when they do, they catch a glimpse of General Sheridan as well. The intertwining monuments are quite moving, exemplifying the passage of time and the pressing social issues in our country’s history.

April  2022


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Fern L. Nesson is a graduate of Harvard Law School and received an MA in American History from Brandeis and an M.F.A in Photography from the Maine Media College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She practiced law in Boston for twenty years and subsequently taught American History and Mathematics at the Cambridge School of Weston and the Commonwealth School in Boston. Fern wrote Great Waters: A History of Boston’s Water Supply (1982), Signet of Eternity (2017) and Word (2020). She is currently working on a combined history and photography book on the WPA’s American Guide Series. Nesson's photographs have been shown internationally at the Politecnico University in Torino, Italy, Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France, Ph21 Gallery in Budapest, Hungary and at The University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. In the United States, Fern has had solo exhibitions at the Grifffin Museum of Photography, MIT Museum, The MetaLab at Harvard, the Beacon Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, the Pascal Gallery in Rockport, and Maine, and Through This Lens Gallery in Durham, NC. Additionally, her work has been selected for numerous juried exhibitions in the U.S., Barcelona, Rome and Budapest. Her photobooks, Signet of Eternity and WORD, won the 10th and the 12th Annual Photobooks Award from the Davis-Orton Gallery. Nesson’s photography work can be found at fernlnesson.com.

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