NEW YORK — Members of the LGBT community, along with local and federal officials, gathered at New York City’s Stonewall Inn on Monday to dedicate the site as the first national monument to gay rights.
The Stonewall National Monument will cover a swath of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, including the tavern and the adjacent Christopher Park. The neighborhood around the bar was the site of riotous protests in 1969 after gay patrons of the bar fought back against a police raid.
‘‘We never could have imagined [we would] see this,’’ said one of the veterans of that struggle, Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt.
Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said at the dedication ceremony that the monument reflects that the United States is ‘‘a nation that aspires to be as inclusive as it is diverse.’’
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President Obama announced the creation of the monument last week. He declared the bar and the area surrounding it a national monument and also created a unit of the National Park Service dedicated to the gay rights movement.
New York’s annual Pride Parade on Sunday passed between the park and the tavern.
The city’s first Pride Parade took place in 1970, a year after the rebellion that was prompted by police harassment at the Stonewall Inn.