Roughly a dozen people gathered at Upper Ramble’s Civic Plaza on Thursday. They crowded around a podium and a plaque covered by a pride flag. The new marker honors St. John’s Place, one of Fayetteville’s first gay bars, which once stood in the lot now occupied by the Walton Arts Center.
Many city leaders and community members spoke during the event, including City Council member Teresa Turk, who led the campaign to install the marker. She began her remarks by recalling a saying from the 1970s:
“We’ve come a long way, baby, remember that. I would argue that that sums up Fayetteville and around the world — from a handful of marchers down Dixon Street in the 1970s and the 1980s to over 35,000 guests. They’re going to show up in our lovely city this weekend. We have really come a long way.”
The unveiling took place ahead of NWA Pride, a weekend-long festival that has become Arkansas’ largest pride event. Richard Gathright, director of NWA Pride, said it’s essential to have bars that serve as safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community.
“And you know that we don’t have as many as we used to, but we still have so many bars and other places in this town that are safe spaces for us to go. Absolutely. I mean, people forget — time goes by, people die off. You have a younger generation that had no idea that what was down here before Walton Arts Center was built. So I think it’s very important that … the younger generation understands … where everything started, where it went, where it’s going.”
Council member Bob Stafford also took the stage yesterday and shared his personal history as a young queer man growing up in Fayetteville.
“Although when St. John’s Place was here, I was technically too young to have visited. I did visit St. John’s Place, and it wasn’t just St. John’s. After St. John’s, we had Ron’s Place in the 1950s. My mom was a theater and drama major. They would hang out at George’s. And so Fayetteville has a history of this. But the more important part of the history is that, when I was growing up, all these places were about community, and they were about family. We only had, like, one or two places to go at a time, and when you were there, everybody was there.”
The plaque itself includes a brief history of the LGBTQ+ community in the area and a photo of St. John’s Place. Sandra Cox Birchfield took the photo.
“I was fresh out of journalism school, a fresh UofA graduate, and I was just trying to make some pocket change. So I was freelancing for an alternative newspaper in Fayetteville at the time called the Grapevine, and my assigned project was to document and talk to the businesses that were going to be going away once the Walton Arts Center was built. So I just went around taking photos, and I didn’t know St. John’s history. I just thought it was ponies, a cowboy bar. Teresa Turk contacted me. I scanned it in high resolution, zoomed in, I saw unicorns. I’m like, what? So I had this all this time. It’s an honor, but really, it’s not about me, but it’s an honor.”
Fayetteville’s long-range planning and special projects manager, Britain Bostick, said the public can help document the city’s LGBTQ+ history by sharing their stories with the city.
“This is an exceptionally fun project. We are working on a citywide historic context statement. What that means is we are gathering the histories of us, and we’re trying to categorize them so that we can try to include as many groups and history types as possible. We’ll be working on that for about the next year and a half. So if anybody has a story to share with us, particularly if it’s about their experience in queer-friendly or LGBTQ-friendly spaces, we would really love to hear from our community about those places and where they were. A great way is to reach out to our historic preservation planner Kylie Cole. Her email is kcole@fayetteville‑ar.gov.”
NWA Pride kicks off this evening with the Trans March and rally at Upper Ramble at 6 p.m. Visit their website for a full weekend schedule and event details.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The authoritative record of KUAF programming is the audio record.
