Site of Portofino

From the late 1950s until 1975, 206 Thompson Street was the location of Portofino, a casual, low-key Italian restaurant. It was a popular spot with Greenwich residents as well as the occasional celebrity, and although it didn't serve an exclusively gay clientele, the restaurant also served as a discreet meeting place for lesbians on Friday nights. The restaurant closed long ago and has been replaced by other establishments (the Malt House, as of this writing), but Portofino has a surprisingly significant legacy for a defunct restaurant.

It was in Portofino in 1963 that Edith "Edie" Windsor met Thea Spyer. Windsor was a young woman who had recently moved to the city after divorcing her husband. They were married roughly a year, but it was enough time for Windsor to realize that she would never be happy with a man. But even in Manhattan, it wasn't easy to openly identify as a lesbian. Windsor asked a friend to take her someplace where she could meet women and her friend took her to Portofino, where she met Spyer, whose family had immigrated from the Netherlands to escape Nazism. The two women had an immediate connection; on that first night, they danced at a friend's apartment until Windsor wore a hole in her stocking.

Spyer was a psychologist and Windsor worked for IBM. Windsor's work environment, in particular, was not amenable to same-sex couples, so the pair hid their relationship. When Spyer proposed, she did so with a pendant rather than a ring, fearing the repercussions they would face. The couple was engaged for decades and eventually married in 2007 in Canada, just two years before Spyer's death.

Following Spyer's death, Windsor received a tax bill for more than $300,000 from the federal government, as well as one for more than $200,000 from the state. Because the pair's marriage was not legally recognized at the time, Windsor was not exempt from the estate tax, as heterosexual couples were. The Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, which was signed into law in 1996, defined marriage for federal purposes as the union of one man and one woman.

Windsor challenged the law, and in 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Windsor that the federal government's interpretation of marriage as the union of a man and a woman was unconstitutional. In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that state-level bans on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. The decades-long love story of Thea Spyer and Edie Windsor led to landmark rulings that guaranteed LGBT couples the same rights as their heterosexual counterparts, and it began in an Italian restaurant in the West Village.

LGBT History in All Corners: The South Village , Village Preservation . June 13th 2017. Accessed December 22nd 2020. https://www.villagepreservation.org/2017/06/13/lgbt-history-in-all-corners-the-south-village/.

Dwyer, Jim . She Waited 40 Years to Marry, Then When her Wife Died, the Tax Bill Came , New York Times . June 7th 2012. Accessed December 22nd 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/nyregion/woman-says-same-sex-marriage-bias-cost-her-over-500000.html.

Totenberg , Nina . Meet the 83-Year-Old Taking on the US Over Same Sex Marriage , NPR. March 21st 2013. Accessed December 22nd 2020. https://www.npr.org/2013/03/21/174944430/meet-the-83-year-old-taking-on-the-u-s-over-same-sex-marriage.

Portofino, NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project . Accessed December 22nd 2020. https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/portofino/#:~:text=Portofino%2C%20an%20Italian%20restaurant%20in,the%20Supreme%20Court%20in%202013..