On Pride Weekend, the Stonewall Visitor Center Opens

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today, and on Fridays through the summer, we’ll focus on things to do in New York over the weekend.

Credit…Sara Hylton for The New York Times

Diana Rodriguez, the chief executive of Pride Live, which runs the new Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center, pointed to an old-fashioned jukebox.

“Go ahead, give it a whirl,” she said.

I dropped in a Stonewall-branded coin and chose a song.

The machine whirred, for five seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, as Rodriguez explained that it was the same model as the one that was at the Stonewall Inn on the night of the Stonewall uprising 55 years ago — the event that ushered in an era of gay pride and activism for gay rights.

Five more seconds passed before the music started — the gospel standard “Oh Happy Day.”

The jukebox is just one of the elements that mix past and present in the $3.2 million visitor center in Greenwich Village, which opens today after six years of development. The center, which is privately funded, largely through corporate donations, memorializes the bar’s history and the night in 1969 when a police raid set off several days of riots.

It is small, considering the significance of what happened there and its standing as the first national monument to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and history. But the Stonewall Inn wasn’t very large to begin with, and there is, in fact, a lot to see.