8. Lesbian Herstory Archives
The Lesbian Herstory Archives, a research facility/community center/museum, is located in the Park Slope Historic District at 484 14th Street in Brooklyn. The Archives were founded in 1974 at the Upper West Side apartment of Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel and were moved to the Park Slope location in 1993 (which explains why it’s not listed in the 1973 designation). The archives preserve a wide variety of documents dating from the 1950s to the present.
Inside the archives, you will find “periodicals, files on lesbian activist groups, audio-visual materials, oral histories, and the personal and professional papers of lesbians from a diversity of cultural, ethnic, and class-based communities,” says the LPC. Organizations such as Daughters of Bilitis, the Salsa Soul Sisters, and the papers of famous activists like Barbara Gittings, Mabel Hampton, and Audre Lorde are all preserved in the archives. In 2022, the building was designated an individual landmark.