New York doesn’t ask before it changes. It just does it, usually at night, usually on a street that hasn’t made it onto any map that matters yet. Christopher Street in Greenwich Village looked like all the others on June 28, 1969—low brick buildings, a bar with blacked-out windows, the kind of block the city was still making up its mind about. By morning it had a different weight. Not a monument yet, not a landmark, just a corner where something cracked open and couldn’t be sealed back.