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 fit. Some people said “Liberty Park,” others said “Liberty Square,” and others said “Liberty Plaza.” Neither name would ever quite become standard. But when I told the Egyptian woman in the food cart on the corner that the place had been renamed “Liberty,” she grinned.
I stood by while Lucas Vazquez called Brookfield on his cell phone. There were rumors that maybe the company had decided to allow the encampment to remain there. He asked if that was true.
“So,” Lucas said, after hanging up, “he said they have not allowed us to sleep over. And he said that we’d be arrested for trespassing if we sleep over—his words.”
Lucas was a high school senior from Long Island, which was hard to believe, except for the fact that he’d have to leave at night to catch the Long Island Rail Road for home. He’d already helped organize the May 12 march on Wall Street and Bloombergville, and then was part of the planning GAs for this. He was serious and smart, and game for anything—but stuck in educational servitude.
“I’d rather come here than school, but I wanna graduate,” he said.
Across the park, the actress-turned-political-candidate Rosanne Barr was giving a speech through a megaphone demanding “the blessed and holy guillotine” for “guilty leaders” and “priests.” The marchers returned, victorious. The Food Committee’s peanut butter sandwiches were there to greet them.
As the sun set, just after seven o’clock, a facilitator from the planning meetings opened the evening session of the General Assembly. “You know what general assemblies are,” he cried. “You’ve seen it in Tunisia. You’ve seen it in Egypt. You’ve seen it in Spain. And now you see it on Wall Street!”
The police presence was growing, with horses and plastic cuffs. This was foremost on people’s minds, but it didn’t stop a few from taking the opportunity of assembly to grandstand about whatever. A woman who’d called for a general strike earlier did so again, and another demanded the end of corporate personhood. “Buy physical silver!” someone advised—not the only one to do so that day. Across the plaza, a drum circle nearly drowned out their voices anyway.
The real substance of the discussion was simply about what to do. Some felt that they’d come to occupy Wall Street, and they wouldn’t be satisfied except there. But Wall Street was completely barricaded off and surrounded by police. “I propose that we march to Wall Street and sleep on the people’s sidewalk,” said Lucas. A man in a suit and tie volunteered to “repair to Wall Street for repose,” set up a tent, and see what would happen. It was a tough call.
“I love this space,” another voice said. “It’s very comfortable. But revolution is not about comfort!”
Finally, the assembly arrived at the decision to stay in Liberty Square indefinitely and to take good care of it. People split up into working and thematic groups to begin the business of doing so. One of the most tempting of these to join, given the circumstances, was the meditation and massage circle; already, the crowd had thinned from a couple thousand to a couple hundred, and it was thinning more, while the number of police grew. Some were saying that there had been an undercover cop in the Media Committee, and theories were circulating about others. A group returned with dumpster-dived cardboard for sleeping.
Looking around at who was there, I noticed also who was not. Nobody from Adbusters; Micah White, in Berkeley, had taken a vow against flying on planes for the year, and Kalle Lasn had an elderly mother-in-law to attend to in Canada. Georgia Sagri wasn’t there either; “I wasn’t and am still not interested in the metaphorics of the occupation,” she would later tell me. Alexa O’Brien was “running the back end” for this and actions around the country that day. She brought supplies but would hardly be seen on the plaza thereafter.
I walked along the sidewalk to see what the police were doing. They seemed ready to move in and clear the park. A black Suburban drove up
