The Night the Stonewall Inn Became a Proud Shrine

Inspector Pine ordered his officers into the nearest — and unlikeliest — sanctuary: the Stonewall Inn. He turned to Mr. Smith and asked, “You want to come in? It’s probably safer.” The reporter followed him, and the police slammed shut the very door they had entered for the raid a short while ago.

The barrage of flying debris intensified outside — “garbage, garbage cans, pieces of glass, fire, bricks, cobblestones,” Mr. Carter wrote. A man named John O’Brien happened upon the block and, harboring no love for the police, quickly joined in as the hurled missiles grew larger. “We wanted to outdo the last person,” he said. “Nobody knew how far this was going to go.”

He saw men wrestling a parking meter out of the ground. They succeeded, and ran, meter-first, at the Stonewall’s doors, using it as a battering ram. The booming inside the bar rattled the walls and officers alike. Inspector Pine opened the door and darted outside, grabbing the first person he could and dragging him into the bar — the folk singer Dave Van Ronk, who had been at the Lion’s Head bar nearby and came to see what the commotion was about.

Outside, someone squirted fluid from a cigarette lighter on the plywood covering a window. “There were flames,” an onlooker said later. “They were blue and had little yellow tips.” Inside, the officers drew their guns.

“I ordered them not to shoot,” Inspector Pine said later. “That I would be the first. You’re so tense and it’s the easiest thing in the world for a shot to go off at that time, and one shot going off will start everybody else off.” The reporter, Mr. Smith, later recalled that he heard the inspector warn officers, “Anybody who fires their gun without me saying ‘Fire!’ is gonna be in big, big trouble. You’ll be walking the loneliest beat on Staten Island for the rest of your career.”

Some kids broke through the Stonewall’s door again, Mr. White said, and “as though working to a prior plan, systematically dump refuse from waste cans into the Wall, squirt it with lighter fluid, and ignite it.”

Inside the bar, Inspector Pine had helped a policewoman sneak out a back window to call for help, and he waited with mounting unease. “I was sure we were gonna have to fire, but I was very reluctant to give the order,” he said.