Sylvia Rivera’s Home

On the bleak spring morning of April 6, 1996, the TV station WPQG interviewed Sylvia Rivera at her home in New York. The camera focused on her rescued plants, her plush bear toy, her salvaged furniture, her little altars with photographs of her chosen family, and her outfits hanging in the improvised walls of her shack—a fragile structure made with broken doors, some plastics, and cardboard. Rivera’s home was in Lower Manhattan at Pier 45, which faced the Hudson River on one side and the wrecked West Side Highway on the other, at the very end of Christopher Street. After a brief period away from Manhattan, Sylvia came back to the piers in 1992, when the body of her friend, the African American sex worker and activist Marsha P. Johnson, was found floating in the Hudson on July 6. It was the place where Rivera labored for decades as a sex worker, lived, and socialized with other members of the LGBTQIA+ community (mostly racialized, gender non-conforming people like herself), and the “homeless” population that actually found a “home” on that piece of land.