I could say to someone, ‘I’m Audrey Hartmann. In a recording, Hartmann says of Cherry Grove, “It was an escape for everyone to be able to come out here on the weekend and be yourself. Hartmann, now 90, was interviewed for the exhibit, “ Safe/Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove,” which opens Friday at the New-York Historical Society, on Manhattan's Upper West Side. She and her longtime partner were some of the first women to buy a home on the island. She would go on to live in Cherry Grove and became a beloved member of the community. Maggie McCorkle and Audrey Hartmann in Cherry Grove, ca. She caught a glimpse into some of the homes and said, “I remember seeing women by candlelight sitting there,” and wished she was one of them.

Hartmann encountered “charming little houses” lit by gas lamps, and wherever she walked were canopies of trees.

Hartmann walked down, and what she saw is on display at a new exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, as well as chronicled in the 1993 book “ Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town” by Esther Newton.