Occupy Wall Street diaspora prepare for re-entry :
On Friday, Sept. 2, Chantal O'Brien was sleeping on the couch in her living room when she awoke to the report of gunshots, two of them, one just after the other.
Bio: Matthew Wolfe is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in The Nation and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He can be reached at matthew.m.wolfe [at] gmail.com
On Friday, Sept. 2, Chantal O'Brien was sleeping on the couch in her living room when she awoke to the report of gunshots, two of them, one just after the other. She went to her window, which overlooks Richman Plaza, in the Bronx. Eight stories below her, she saw a man stumbling through the dusk, clutching his chest. He walked a few feet, then he fell. O'Brien knew the man. It was her ex-boyfriend, Ramel Shepard. More
Posted on November 23rd, 2011 1:31pm
When the NYPD cleared out Zuccotti Park, they dismantled a residence, a recruiting tool, and a central hub for meeting and communication. But they did not destroy the protest’s governing structure: Since Monday’s raid, Occupy Wall Street’s organizers have continued to assemble, taking stock and attempting to figure out what they now want the movement to become. More
Posted on November 21st, 2011 11:48am
The sun was just rising over lower Manhattan, but the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway was lit like high noon by a row of klieg lights.
The march was due to start at 7 a.m., in 15 minutes, and a bank of cameras, aimed into the heart of the financial district, was waiting for first occupier to make his move.
A loose crowd of police officers, half in riot gear, half in regular blue shirts, slouched around a row of barricades. Beside them, a man was hawking copies of the Daily News. The headline read "DO OR DIE FOR OCCUPY." More
Posted on November 17th, 2011 5:20pm
The raid began at 1 a.m. on the dot. Eric Smith, a member of the kitchen crew, was sleeping in his tent, still wearing his chef’s toque.
“I heard ‘Get the fuck up! Get the fuck up! Everybody get the fuck up now!’ ” said Smith, 38. “And then the lights came on and we were surrounded.” When Smith opened the flap of his tent, he saw hundreds of police officers and sanitation workers, backlit by spotlights, streaming into the park. More
Posted on November 15th, 2011 10:11am
Brendan Burke, 41, a bald man with a heavyweight boxer's build, has been coming to Occupy Wall Street since the first week of the movement. He is a near-constant presence at the park, having acted as a sort of security minder for the demonstration before the protest-organized security "working group" even existed. He believes the occupation should pull out of Zuccotti Park before the winter sets in, for reasons of safety and politics.
"I don't think it's a question of commitment," said Burke. "We've been tested before and won, so I don't know how necessary it is to hold the park." More
Posted on November 1st, 2011 2:39pm
At 7 p.m. on Thursday night, 12 hours before the city was to facilitate a scheduled “cleaning”of Zuccotti Park by its owners, Jordan McCarthy, the de facto head of Occupy Wall Street's Sanitation Working Group, was at work making the place shine.
The park's owners, Brookfield Office Properties, had, with the city's blessing, directed that the protesters make way for a day-long cleaning. Brookfield had promised that the demonstrators would be able to return after the cleaning, but that they’d have to abide by a new set of rules that precluded, among other things, possession of sleeping bags and laying down. More
Posted on October 14th, 2011 11:58am
It was a mostly celebratory moment for Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and their political supporters this morning, as word came through from the city and the owners of Zuccotti Park that a scheduled "cleaning"—which they had spent the night nervously preparing for—would be postponed.
At about 7:15, a part of the Zuccotti Park crowd numbering in the hundreds decided to celebrate—and make a statement—by marching down Broadway.
Around the time they reached Wall Street, they moved off the sidewalks and into the street, which was empty. No cars, no police. More
Posted on October 14th, 2011 8:56am
Although the occupants of Zuccotti Park pride themselves on having founded an independent community, they can't seem to escape the adamantine laws of Manhattan real estate.
As the Occupy Wall Street movement enters its fourth week, the congestion in the park is pronounced. During this past weekend of clement weather, the count of protestors camping in the park swelled to over 400. At night, bodies cocooned in sleeping bags and blue tarps sprawled across the granite steppe. Those in the most desirable spots, away from streetlights and foot traffic, have been sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder, and disputes over territory, once unknown, are becoming more common. To accommodate this surge of immigrants, organizers are quietly weighing an expansion to other New York locations. More
Posted on October 12th, 2011 11:44am
Every day, several of the full-time participants in the Occupy Wall Street demonstration drive a U-Haul van to a U.P.S. Store on Fulton Street and fill it, floor to ceiling, with mail.
The mail, sent by people from around the country, contains sleeping bags, blankets, clothes, first aid kits, canned food, books, flashlights, batteries, playing cards—in essence, every item the protestors would need to physically sustain a long-term occupation. It is an indicator of the movement's explosive growth that organizers recently decided to lease a storage unit for the overflow. More
Posted on October 7th, 2011 11:45am
A few days ago, I asked an Occupy Wall Street protester named Kyle Watson what he thought of the criticism that the movement was too disorganized. He replied that it wasn't disorganized: it was collaborative.
"I think some people are mischaracterizing it as disorganized because there's no central hub," he said. "There isn't a hub because there isn't a hierarchy. It's an experiment, like a bunch of cells congealing into a new organism, and we don't know what it will be yet. It's like a Petri dish." More
Posted on October 5th, 2011 3:36pm
