“I am my own liberation,” declares one of the participants in “The Stroll,” and the same could be said for everyone in this moving documentary — especially co-director Kristen Lovell, who was inspired by her own life to memorialize a time, place and experience that has been forgotten at best and vilified at worst.
If your primary images of New York’s Meatpacking District come from “Sex and the City” or shopping trips, you may not remember the neighborhood around West 14th Street before gentrification. As a longtime resident explains, “The S&M bars, the hookers, the meatpackers. That’s what was down here.” Yes, it really was home to meatpacking plants by day, before sex workers took over at night.