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If you’ve lived in LGBT New York for some years, you might recall a time when the city’s abandoned piers along the Hudson were best known for nocturnal trysting. Way back then, The LGBT Center’s Garden Party was a neighborhood event hosted in an erstwhile parking lot with a single catering company. What a difference three decades makes.
Now celebrating its 32nd anniversary, The Center’s Garden Party hosts more than 1,500 guests at one of the largest LGBT food festivals in the country and one of the most celebrated tasting events in the culinary world.
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This year’s Garden Party 32 “A Taste of Pride” returned to the city’s reborn waterfront at Hudson River Park’s Pier 84 with tastings from dozens of New York City’s premier restaurants. The seasonal menu included such summer pleasures as watermelon gazpacho, chilled pea soup with peekytoe crab, sriracha fries, paella mixta with calamari, cardamom buns, and chili chocolate cake. Garden Party’s open bar was sponsored by Smirnoff and Captain Morgan, with Mother Nature providing the complementary cocktail sunset.
The traditional kick-off event to NYC Pride Week, Garden Party is as much a sartorial showcase as it is a gastronomic festival. Invariably, guests at Garden Party are as festive as the food they devour, sporting seersucker and suspenders, bow ties and bowlers, waistcoats and boaters, as well as glitter, spangles, and beads.
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The Center’s Executive Director Glennda Testone was joined onstage by various political and media luminaries, including Congressman Jerrold Nadler and former New York State Senator Tom Duane.
The Center‘s longest-running event is also its largest annual fundraiser, thanks to corporate sponsorships such as presenting sponsor Prudential. This year’s Garden Party raised over $235,000 to benefit The Center’s vital programs and services for the LGBT community. More than 6,000 people visit The Center weekly, with more than 300 groups meeting at the beloved West Village institution.
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Throughout its 32-year history, The Center has built community through arts and culture, wellness and recovery in its mission to envision a world where LGBT people no longer face discrimination or isolation because of who they love.
The Center is home to a rainbow coalition of life-changing and life-saving organizations, from Youth Pride Chorus to Center families, as well as the largest LGBT Career Fair in the Northeast—and the proceeds from Garden Party enable the Center to remain open 365 days a year.
