meeting was full of new faces, and sign holders stood against a substantial line of police on the sidewalk along Broadway. People passing by snapped pictures of the vast spread of messages painted on cardboard that was becoming Zuccotti Park’s new floor.
In the rupture of the ordinary that characterized those early days, everything felt in some sense religious, charged with a secret extremity and transcendence—secret, because the rest of the world hadn’t yet become aware of what was happening down at Liberty Square. Whenever I came back to Liberty after some time away, there was a feeling of entering sacred ground. Yet the moment I arrived, I was suddenly in a whirl of frantic conversations about worldly things: squabbles, crises, food mishaps, small victories, marches, and so on. All those things were sacred too. Once enmeshed in this kind of talk, you couldn’t escape the plaza if you tried, because someone else, and then someone else, would come up to you with some other fantastic question or need. It was a place especially conducive to those of us with obsessive tendencies, who like to be consumed in a given interest or project to the exclusion of all else. There, the god of ordinary life was dead, resurrected in the business of self-reliance.
Notwithstanding what Liberty Square would later devolve into, it had a Puritanical single-mindedness early on. One night, in the middle of a group cozying up to go to sleep, somebody slipped out a bottle of vodka. “What are you doing with that?” another whispered. Why bother with that when there’s this? Chain-smoked, hand-rolled cigarettes were ubiquitous, but at first that was it. Some would confess to me that they were desperate for a joint, it had been so long. They hadn’t been tending to their addictions.
I remember watching, one morning, a guy in glasses as he greeted the sunrise by putting out a small rug, alone, and beginning the morning salat, which Muslims pray five times daily. Just as he started, one of the food vendors on the plaza came out from his stand and interrupted him. He pointed eastward, correcting the Occupier’s guess as to the direction of Mecca.
On Tuesday the sun rose—behind clouds—on a tent city. Although police had made clear they wouldn’t tolerate any structures, the prospect of overnight rain made a group of Occupiers decide around midnight the night before to set up tarps over media and food supplies, as well as to erect some of the tents that had been donated by Lupe Fiasco to sleep in themselves. This would make for their roughest confrontation yet with those sworn to serve and protect them.
While few were yet awake, I got up out of the deluxe-sized tent where I slept with almost a dozen others and wandered around the plaza. I heard a motorcycle cop saying on his cell phone, “That’s my plan—to have them down as soon as possible.” On the north side of the park, where the morning before there had been three TV news trucks to serve as witnesses, there was now only an NYPD Communications Division Command Post truck. Inside I saw an officer with “COUNTERTERRORISM” on the back of his uniform.
At 6:58, a cop wearing a suit and tie began walking through the plaza, peering through the mesh into tents where Occupiers were sleeping, demanding, “The tents have to come down.”
Those who spent the night woke up and sprang into various sorts of action. Some immediately began complying by pulling out tent poles—“for the good of the movement”—while others insisted that they should stop. Still more suggested a middle path: to hold up the tents and tarps by hand, rather than with poles. An ad hoc meeting started in the center of the plaza to discuss the matter, but in the course of it nearly all the tents and tarps were taken down by self-appointed volunteers. A lot of people were frantic. A lot of people were terrified.
The scattered arguments and confusion coalesced at the plaza’s northern wall, where General Assembly meetings were being held. At around 7:20, Justin Wedes—a twenty-five-year-old, Twitter-savvy schoolteacher with close-cropped hair and thick black glasses—takes hold of the megaphone to speak. His words are echoed fervently but unnecessarily by the people’s mic, and like many others he has nearly lost his voice from all the chanting.
“We derive strength from each other,” he says, as the soon-to-be-notorious Captain Edward Winski walks up to him, followed by a posse of officers. Winski whispers something in Justin’s ear, presumably an order to put down the megaphone. But Justin continues: “More important than that, though”—until Winski grabs him, throws him to the ground, folds his arms expertly around his back, and takes him away.
“Shame! Shame!” shout Occupiers, and, “The whole world is watching!” That was the last time I saw any of them with a megaphone on Liberty Square.
Ten minutes later, the police were back. A group of them approached an Occupier near the rear of the meeting. As he was accosted and cuffed, officers shoved others aside, who started chanting the NYPD’s motto, “Courtesy, professionalism, respect!” In the scuffle, a guy who had been making peace signs with both hands high above his head was pushed to the ground and arrested as well.
The incursions seemed timed to prevent a repeat of the big march and picket at the Stock Exchange that had begun around that time the day before. But if that was the case, the police needn’t have bothered; Tuesday’s march was planned for 9:00, and I looked at my cell phone as it started and saw that the time was 9:00 on the dot. I don’t recall, before or since, Occupiers ever doing anything quite so punctually.
As if in retaliation for the march, cops were back on the plaza again an hour later. This time the excuse was the tarp that had been laid over sensitive media equipment. By then it was raining, and nearly all the Occupiers’ possessions had been collected under tarps, plastic bags, and unassembled tents. But the media area was what interested the police. A group of officers approached the tarp, and the officer in charge gave orders through a megaphone that it should be removed. An Occupier climbed on top of it, banging a drumstick against a pan lid. He was grabbed, but slipped away, and began drumming again. Then, several officers took him to the ground. While he was being cuffed and beaten, he cried out, “I can’t breathe!” and called for his inhaler.
Another, Jason Ahmadi, then stepped up to hold the tarp in his place. Jason had already been arrested the day before for writing “Love” on the sidewalk, just after a woman had been arrested for sidewalk chalking as well. This time, going limp, he was pulled off the tarp by police officers, dragged, cuffed, and then dragged more across the plaza and the sidewalk on his back, with his hands trapped in plastic cuffs between the sidewalk and his back. By the end of it, they were discolored and bloody.
One other guy close to me was grabbed too, and the cops pushed his face into a flower bed while he was cuffed. As a woman was taken away to a police van, a man ran after her shouting that he loved her. She, like several other female protesters that week, was taken not just to jail but to a psychiatric evaluation, as if on suspicion of hysteria.
Officers finally removed the tarp from the media equipment, exposing it to the rain, and left the plaza with other tarps, tents, and trash bags still in place. There was a standoff on the edge of the sidewalk as protesters chanted, shouted, and stood silently before the police, who at last received the order to withdraw.
There were seven arrests that morning, in three incursions. Each of them, for the Occupiers, was a new trial. They warned each other of the next incursion with steady tom-tom beats and other loud noises. Some offered acts of dignified resistance, while others yelled angrily, or sang chants, or simply watched. At the end of the last incident, a group convened to discuss deescalation techniques.
By late morning in Liberty Square, under a light drizzle, there was a feeling of drifting, of lost cohesion. The holdouts tried to find things to do, like hold signs, or play music in their underwear for the police, or defiantly recline on tarps, or arrange for the next meal. There was serious talk about abandoning the plaza, about other places to go in the area: south to Battery Park or west to the Irish Hunger Memorial. Maybe that was the fear talking, or maybe it was undercover cops, or maybe it was sensible. But once again inertia carried
