shirts. Not long after he pulled away, the second row of police disappeared, as well as the horses. The drumming quieted, and the newfound Occupiers started going to sleep.
There would be no raid that night. A dilemma had been posed to the powerful, and for the moment the powerful capitulated.
I saw Marisa Holmes. She was ecstatic, with the caveat of course that there were no guarantees. Along with some other organizers from the city, she left for the night. I prepared to go to a colleague’s apartment to help edit the video he’d shot that day. As I left, I wrote to myself that I didn’t think it would last. I didn’t think it would change anything. I was tired, and all I could feel was the precariousness.
“They’re so young, they think they know everything,” one police officer said to another. I heard other cops talk about how much they take home after taxes.
Neither they nor anyone else seemed to grasp what was happening in front of them. How could they? It had taken the organizers long enough to begin to realize what they were organizing, and they still didn’t really know. There would be time to start figuring it out, though, because the occupation was staying.
Sunday, day two, the Occupiers kept busy. There was such a barrage of details between them and what this could be. They were making signs, eating donated pizza, collecting trash, laying down sleeping bags and cardboard to sleep on, and running a media center on a few uncomfortable tables with a generator and a wifi hotspot. They conducted a large, loud march around the Financial District. But, mostly, they assembled. There were several hours of General Assembly meetings in the morning, and then an extended debate—from midafternoon until late at night—about what the plan of action would be for Monday, when the neighborhood’s population would turn from tourists grazing for photogenic prey to those coming to do the very business that this occupation was there to oppose.
Early in the afternoon, it seemed that the chilly first night had taken a toll. Numbers in Liberty Square were lower than they had been the evening before. Those still around sang redemption songs a little behind the beat, or intently read texts of significance, or simply sat and waited. Others tried to confirm more rumors of police agents in their midst. But as evening fell, some of the previous day’s energy returned, as did an influx of new people who’d heard about the occupation on the Internet or from friends—still only two or three hundred in all. Pizza kept arriving through the night, and through its little crisis.
At about 9:15 p.m., by way of Occupiers reporting to the General Assembly, the police demanded that all the signs that were beginning to proliferate on the park’s walls and trees be taken down. There was a fractious reaction at first. Some thought it a reasonable request and wanted to comply. Others refused on principle, not wanting to be taking orders from the police. People on either side made speeches and tried to start chants. Some took it upon themselves to remove signs, and others moved to stop them. There were whispers that undercover cops were sowing divisions, though it hardly seemed like the Occupiers required any help with that. Just when unity was needed, it wasn’t there. Officers started taking down signs themselves while Occupiers chanted, “Shame! Shame!”
The focal point of it all became a spot on the eastern edge of the park, along Broadway. Several protesters—women and men, young and older—decided to sit down there in front of a Socialist Workers Party poster (whose affiliation would later be stripped from it) that said, “a job is a right! capitalism doesn’t work.” Others tried to get them to move, but they wouldn’t. The police didn’t move them either. There were no gory arrests. The sign remained as long as they did. Police and fellow protesters withdrew, and the meeting continued.
Moments like these were messy and far from flattering, and there would be many more to come.
I slept my first night in Liberty Square without a sleeping bag, curled up on a few sheets of cardboard. There were people playing music quietly with guitars and drums in far corners of the park. Near me the medics were planning for the next day’s action. A couple dozen Occupiers had just held a candlelight vigil by the barricades that were still surrounding the blocks around the Stock Exchange, mourning the death of capitalism. The barricades proved to them that they were winning. “Wall Street is already occupied,” one person had said earlier. “We’ve already achieved our objective.”
On Monday morning, I woke up just after sunrise with the shivers. My eyes opened to see polished shoes and suit pants and skirts passing all around me, walking from the subway to work. There were TV news trucks on the north edge of the park. A groggy woman near me cried, “Look at the news, guys!”
After overnighters groggily packed up their bedding and lined up for dumpster-dived bagels, an unplanned-for 7 a.m. General Assembly session began. Its purpose was a rundown of the day’s events. Committees that met the night before had decided to have marches to Wall Street at 9:00, 11:30, and 3:30. But then somebody came to the front of the assembly and announced through the people’s mic that he was going to march right then. Wall Street bankers were walking to work, and we were just sitting there. The commuters would already be at their desks by nine. He ran off and, promptly, more than a hundred others followed. They marched around the plaza first, chant wasing, “All Day! All Week! Occupy Wall Street!” and then set off heading south on Broadway. The occupation was starting the workweek early.
Upon arriving at Wall Street, the marchers found that the blocks around the New York Stock Exchange, which had been barricaded completely throughout the weekend, now had open sidewalks. After briefly massing at Wall and Broadway, they proceeded down the sidewalk on Wall Street, chanting and banging on the barricades that were still blocking off the street, making a mighty noise. They flooded the commuters trying to get to work in that area and clogged the way—which was the point. “We! Are! The 99 percent!” they chanted. To the large detachment of police alongside them, they’d sometimes replace “We” with “You.”
For almost two hours the march went on, continually evading attempts by police to pin it into an enclosed space or guide it out of the area. When the barricades on Broad Street were opened in order to let the marchers out (and keep them out), they used hand signals to turn around and head back up toward Wall Street. The march morphed into a long, two-directional picket line along Wall Street itself, going back and forth and back and forth as the Stock Exchange’s opening bell rang. “Ring! The! Bell!” they cried. With so many Occupiers out in the streets, scouts went back to make sure that there were still enough people in Liberty Square to hold it.
Most bystanders and commuters in the midst of the march weren’t amused. (The goal wasn’t to amuse them.) “Shit” was something I heard a lot. A bitter dog walker said to a security guard, “They say it’s their street”—the chant was “Whose street? Our street!”—“but they don’t even pay taxes.” Along those lines, also, I heard the soon-to-be-ubiquitous “Get a job!” And then there was ambivalence: “I hope the police protect the financial . . . bullshit.”
A middle-aged woman from El Salvador with painted eyebrows and a coffee in her hand said, “We used to do this in my country in the ’70s and ’80s. They’d arrest all of us.” She was on her way to work but took pictures of the police officers in charge and made sure I did too, just to have them on record.
When the “Let’s! Go! Home!” chant finally came at around quarter after nine, the march returned victoriously to Liberty Square and took stock. There were four arrests over the course of it—for crimes such as stepping off the sidewalk and touching a barricade—followed by several more as the day went on. A meeting convened to talk about how to do it better next time. These people were not just there to march; they were there to occupy, to discuss, and to build a blessed community.
Over the course of the day, more and more reporters turned up. It was one thing to hang around a private park for the weekend, but it was another to stay into the workweek and disrupt the business of the Financial
