On September 16, the night before whatever it was was slated to begin, I opted to pass on covering a civil-disobedience training to satisfy my curiosity about an occupation-themed Critical Mass bike ride setting out from Tompkins Square Park. Online, Anonymous associated the ride with something called “Operation Lighthouse.”
A critical mass there was not, unless you counted the police, who were stationed at every corner of the park and periodically motorcycled by to monitor the handful of bicyclists waiting in vain for more to turn up. The bicyclists accepted soup and coffee from enterprising evangelists and obtained a tepid blessing for the next day’s undertaking. Rather than invite the police to form a motorcade around the group, those present decided to leave the park one at a time and reconvene downtown for a scouting mission.
After riding into the Financial District and passing by Wall Street, I stopped in front of a boxing match two blocks south of the New York Stock Exchange. Seeping out from the Broad Street Ballroom, an inexhaustible electronic beat surged under a looping bagpipe track. Well-decorated couples and gaggles paid their forty-five dollars per person to slip through the doors and into the crowd surrounding the ring, where two sinewy fighters were bouncing back and forth, punching and kicking each other. They were following Thai-style rules, but the scene looked more like the last days of Rome. Along the back wall stood a row of Doric columns.
On the sidewalk, looking in and around, I recognized Marisa Holmes from the General Assembly meetings as she veered away from the entrance to the boxing match. She looked worried, but she usually looked worried, so it was hard to be sure. We nodded to each other knowingly, like spies, and maybe for a moment even questioned whether to acknowledge each other publicly. But we did, and we exchanged our reconnaissance.
She had just been down at Bowling Green, where a Department of Homeland Security truck was parked. Barricades surrounded the Charging Bull statue like a cage. I told her I had been up at Chase Manhattan Plaza, north of Wall Street, and it was also completely closed off. A stack of barricades sat in wait just across a narrow street. We stood in silence and watched as the fight ended, the combatants making a gesture of good sportsmanship. Marisa continued north to Wall Street, and I got on my bicycle to go home.
Nights in the Financial District are desolate, even ones with scattered boxing fans and police officers preparing for God-knows-what. One can feel the weight of the buildings overhead, all the more because there are so few people around to help bear the load. The buildings seemed completely different, however, while I rode home over the Manhattan Bridge. They were distant, manageable, and light. Rolling high above the East River and looking back at them, I wondered if they had any idea what was coming.
TWO|NEW MESSIAH
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When night fell on September 17, the Financial District had that feeling of loneliness about it again, of lifeless towers, of quiet. This night, though, it was at least somewhat less unoccupied.
One or two hundred people were huddled in circles, scattered around Zuccotti Park’s stone floor. A little before 10 p.m., more than twenty empty police vans passed by them on Broadway in a solemn line, their flashing lights lighting up the empty buildings above. Soon, on that narrow end of the park, there formed two rows of officers with clubs drawn and plastic white handcuffs dangling from their trousers. Two more rows lined the park’s longer northern and southern sidewalks. A trio of officers on horses stood in wait by a scaffold across Broadway. When a pack of boys on BMX bikes cruised past, officers mobbed them and told them to leave the area immediately. The boys tried to argue and tried to linger and witness what was or wasn’t about to happen, but eventually they complied.
The day had begun around noon, when the NYC General Assembly’s Arts & Culture Committee convened its “New York FUN Exchange” at Bowling Green. An anticlimactic crowd of a few hundred people marched for a while around the Charging Bull, which was still surrounded by barricades and a few police officers. “Protect us, not the bull!” the marchers chanted at them. There was yoga, and there was waiting. I talked with a hedge fund guy from New Jersey and a whole new crop of anarchists. Some planners from the October 2011 Coalition came to see how this attempt would go, hoping to learn from it for their own. Soon, the wandering crowd coalesced into a mass on the south end of Bowling Green to hear the performance artist Reverend Billy, who was preaching through a bullhorn on the steps of the Museum of the American Indian.
Adbusters had initially called for twenty thousand people, but this was looking more like two thousand. A lot of them, too, were reporters, though it wasn’t especially easy to tell the reporters apart from the protesters. “There are more cameras here than signs,” I heard someone mutter. The Global Revolution channel, at least, had five thousand viewers online.
“What is this?” went a chant. “This is just practice!” They seemed to be saying it to console themselves.
Others gave short speeches after Reverend Billy finished—whoever wanted to give one. Meanwhile, the Tactics Committee huddled, trying to decide what to do next. Some were saying it was better to have the big assembly where they already were, while others said they should move. Maps were being passed through the crowd with several locations identified and numbered. Chase Manhattan Plaza, which the planners had agreed on for the three o’clock assembly, was obviously out of the running; it was gated shut, so Tactics had decided on Zuccotti Park as the first backup that morning. Gary Roland, who helped pick Zuccotti as the target for OpESR months before, was scouting there. He called another organizer down at Bowling Green to say that it was clear of cops. There were a few drops of rain, adding to the urgency.
And so Tactics made the announcement from the steps of the museum. Location number two: Zuccotti Park. Everyone should walk there, together—in pairs, like the Sand People in Star Wars, so they could go legally on the sidewalk. There was an argument about the wisdom of this choice among those gathered there around the steps, and there were speeches to the contrary, but by then it was too late. The crowd had already started to move.
Moving up Broadway felt slow and maddening, but it was only a few minutes before we were at Zuccotti, filling the space between the granite and the treetop canopy. There were no police blocking it. Actually, it was beautiful. As we poured in, the hard, gray, corporate plaza looked like a promised land.
There, a semblance of an assembly began. Before most people knew what hit them, the General Assembly from Tompkins Square Park had been reconstituted, and it promptly broke into smaller groups so that people could discuss with one another why they’d come. Many had shown up to what they thought was a protest, but what they got was a giant meeting. They took it in stride. Some people talked, while others started to work. Those so equipped pulled out their laptops to upload video, to check in on Internet relay chat channels, or to monitor police scanners.
I heard reporters complaining about how the energy was gone from the earlier chanting and marching. They were disappointed. This wasn’t just a protest, but something subtler and longer, and it would take patience.
But it was still a protest, too. A group of people got restless and decided to go on a march to Wall Street, just a few blocks down Broadway. Led by socialist signs and Anonymous’s signature Guy Fawkes masks, they set off, already crying the chants that would soon be stuck in so many people’s heads around the country: “We! Are! The 99 percent!” and “All day! All week! Occupy Wall Street!” Those who stayed behind were busy trying to figure out just exactly where they were and whether it made sense to stay.
With a smartphone’s glance at Wikipedia, I noticed something interesting. Before 2006, when Brookfield Office Properties named the place after its chairman, Zuccotti Park had another name, which was still on the side of the building to the north: “Liberty Plaza.” Kind of like Tahrir—“Liberation”—Square in Cairo. This