Living in the Square

“I said, ‘I’m a librarian. I can organize books. At this time, organizing books is a revolutionary act.’”

—Betsy Fagin, volunteer at the People’s Library, Zuccotti Park

The Neighborhoods of Zuccotti Park

Occupy Wall Street has acquired notoriety in the press for not having a single message or set of demands, and instead embracing the diversity of opinions that its many different supporters espouse. Various messages were at odds with each other: next to Ron Paul-supporting sworn enemies of the Federal Reserve, who were highly visible holding their “End the Fed” signs along the Broadway side of Liberty Plaza, were others who instead maintained that the Federal Reserve certainly needs reform, but should not be abolished. Zuccotti Park is home to both proponents of specific reforms such as reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, as well as revolutionaries calling for the complete overthrow of capitalism, or indeed an anarchistic abolition of all hierarchies in American government and society.

As the encampment established itself and evolved in Liberty Plaza, these differences—and eventually, divisions—mapped themselves out on the surface of the square and in the lived experience of those sleeping in the park, particularly after tents began to spring up in late October and early November. Although the divisions were not clear-cut, the square began to divide geographically, creating distinct eastern and western ends.

In many ways, the park was one cohesive whole: despite the variety of ultimate objectives held by OWS’s different supporters, everyone involved in the action agreed change was necessary. And in terms of living conditions, with ever more people joining those staying overnight, the entirety of the square soon became crowded and cramped.

It was noticeable, however, that, as the occupation progressed, the eastern and western ends of the square took on an increasingly different aspect from one another. In comparison with the eastern end, where the big red statue was located, the western appeared, on one level, to be more organized: the tents located there were generally larger, providing accommodation for sizeable groups, and they were clustered together in such a way that, starting at the sides of the kitchen, two clear walkways stretched down to the edges of the park.

In contrast with the big sleeping tents at the western end, much of the eastern half of the park was an impassable rat’s nest of small single-occupancy tents. Though, here too, parallel walkways existed on either side, they were at points considerably narrower and more twisting than those at the western end. Despite this appearance of packed chaos, the eastern end of the park was home to most of the major organized activities in the square including the media desk, the live feed video center and the library–all of which were housed in large, well sign-posted tents.

Getting into the park was generally straightforward from the eastern end, where a wide swath of steps led down from the Broadway sidewalk to various points of entry. The steps wrapped around the red statue at the south-eastern corner, the site of the People’s Stage, and down the square’s southern edge; here too, one could enter unimpeded, save for the occasional protester sitting on the steps or demonstrating in front of them.

It was not so easy to gain access from the western end—a long police barricade blocked off most of it, and myriad protesters sat on the steps that led up into the park, which at this end is elevated from the bordering street, hindering entry. At the south-western corner, a collection of tents blocked a short path, creating a dead end and preventing access to one of the major walkways.

As a result the only route into the park at this end was via the northwestern corner, where a tableau of stark contrast, of a sort unique to Occupy Wall Street, greeted the visitor: just across the road from the tranquility of the meditation space, a raised dais encircling a tree adorned with holders of burning incense and various indeterminable spiritual icons and tchotchkes, loomed the white cantilever of a mobile NYPD observation tower, maintaining a sinister Panopticon stare on the vista below.

But access was only the beginning of the differences between the two ends of the park. Though the distinctions were not hard and fast, west and east ends often felt quite distinct, even to the casual visitor. In general it seemed that the eastern end of the park accommodated the more reform-orientated and middle class of the movement’s supporters, while the western end housed more working class and politically uncompromising activists.

The eastern end of the park played host to the People’s Library, the LBGTQ caucus, Información en Español, and the Press, Media Relations, the Legal working groups and, of course, the General Assembly. It was, in short, where most of the movement’s most important functions were headquartered. The western end, by contrast, was home to more overtly radical interventions: a table that advocated taking back land for Native Americans; the Class War Camp, a revolutionary anarchist working group, as well as several other revolutionary booths; and, most famously, the much-maligned drummers of PULSE, who played from a makeshift stage atop the stairs at the western edge of the park.

These were not simply differences in ideological flavoring— they could and did breed a real sense of mutual antipathy between denizens of the eastern and western ends. When describing his organization, KV, one of the organizers of Class War Camp, declared, “This side of the camp isn’t for reform. This side’s for revolution, you know? We’re not—we have nothing to lose. It’s not liberal college kids. We don’t want to fix the system, we want to fucking burn it to the ground.” KV went on to criticize those same “liberal college kids” for returning to sleep in their dorms in the evenings, and recounted how, once, when visiting the eastern end of the park in search of a rumored open mic event, he was told that the event’s organizer was away “in the ghetto”—only to discover that “in the ghetto” meant his own end of the park, “near Class War.”

The disdain could travel in the other direction too. Daniel Levine, who helped found Info Desk East, the inquiry point that stood at the top of the stairs at the eastern edge of the park, fit KV’s characterization of east-end protesters all too well: Levine is a 22-year-old student at Baruch College, who, instead of camping in the park, went home to his apartment in Brooklyn to sleep. Of the western end, Mr. Levine said, “the west end of the park gets pretty nasty sometimes—I’m friends with some of the guys in Sanitation and they tell me that’s usually [where it happens] if they have fights or drug dealers,” that it was home to “seedier elements,” and that the west end was viewed as an undesirable place in which to spend time, because the “drummers, they don’t know how to drum. It mostly just sounds like someone knocking on a door really loud for a long time,” and because of a maddening concentration there of “fucking hippies who want to play ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ 18 times in front of the table.” Despite these attitudes Mr. Levine was dismissive of KV’s politicized picture of a specifically East-West divide within the park, calling it “an interesting take.” Rather, he felt, where people settled in the park was determined not so much by high ideals as, more pragmatically, where the table giving out free cigarettes was located at any given point in time.

Moreover, east versus west was far from the sole axis of division that emerged within the encampment over the course of its first two months. Socio-economic divides in the park became evident around hygiene issues. Middle-class, more educated occupiers tended to have friends, or friends of friends, with apartments not far away. These contacts provided bathing facilities and even beds to crash in when occupiers needed a break from camping. Less schooled, poorer, and more troubled sleepers were, by contrast, left in the cold—even activists from the Comfort working group were not always sure how to help them.

When nearby residents who were sympathetic to the movement offered their apartments for occupiers to shower in, Comfort workers decided to send only those campers whom they felt would be “polite” and “respectful,” and who didn’t use drugs, to the middle-class households that would be hosting them. Mentally organized people with cultural capital thus had a good chance at getting clean. Others, not so fortunate—perhaps numbering among the western end’s “seedier elements”—were less able to get a shower.

The occupation’s sleeping areas, too, became marked by differences in class–and race. A young Latino occupier, David, described the Northeast side of the park as full of well-educated and mainly white people, including a sleep camp calling itself the “Upper East Side Sacks.” Meanwhile, Zuccotti’s Southwest side was “all black and Latino.” The divisions were “just like New York City,” David noted.

Perhaps most divisive of all was the split of opinion among occupiers concerning the General Assembly and its decisions. Notwithstanding its ostensibly consensus-based structure, the General Assembly was, in the eyes of some, and particularly among residents of the western half of the park, a body that was not truly representative of the totality of the park’s round-theclock occupiers.

Among the GA’s detractors along Zuccotti Park’s western end, the General Assembly’s introduction of large, military-style tents, originally set up to provide a safe sleeping space for women who felt threatened, proved an especially sore point: KV of Class War Camp feared that, despite the tents’ original intended purposes, their use would spread and overrun occupiers’ existing tents, giving the camp the dreary aspect of a barracks.

An anonymous young woman in her early-to-mid 20s was convinced that a move by the General Assembly that would force occupiers into the military tents was imminent, and expressed serious disquiet at the potential safety hazards she saw in sharing such a tent with a large number of strangers, along with concern about how she would care for her small cat under these conditions. According to her, the General Assembly, moreover, lacked authority to tell occupiers what to do: “Those pussies in the GA don’t even sleep here,” she accused, “so how can they then turn around and dictate to us who do live here how to live?”

Derrick, another occupier, to whom she expressed these concerns, confirmed that he shared them. Separately, KV also suggested that he, unlike those who participated in the General Assembly, could not attend the nightly meetings because he was busy “holding down [his] camp,” and called the Assembly’s consensus model “bullshit,” because, as he put it, “just because I can’t attend . . . doesn’t mean I don’t have a voice, and if I want to object over there I’d damn well better be able to object right now and say ‘fuck you.’” Among these protesters, a sense of revolutionary authenticity was growing, a feeling that not everyone in the Liberty Plaza camp bore the same level of commitment to the protest, and thus, that not everyone had the same right to a voice.

These were only some of the fissures that expanded within the diverse community residing in Zuccotti. More grievances against the General Assembly came to light. At one point, the assembly’s mic checks began to conflict with PULSE’s drumming, which led to a dramatic confrontation between the two groups that was ultimately only defused with the help of the movement’s corps of mediators. Malfeasance, too, on occasion led to unpleasant episodes, as when Dan Levine discovered that the cigarette-rolling working group, Nick at Nite, was pocketing movement money, leading to the group’s disappearance. Occupy Wall Street, an intentionally diverse and inclusive action, was increasingly having to confront divisions that permeated wider society, inside its own ranks.

The Kitchen

If the Zuccotti Park encampment was “semireligious,” as Rolling Stone magazine said that many in the park described it—and “a spiritual insurrection,” according to Adbusters editor Micah White, then one of the occupiers’ most holy acts was visiting the kitchen to get breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Heather Squire found her calling among the pizza boxes, the peanut butter and jelly, and the lines of OWS sleepers and day trippers, hands outstretched, waiting to be dished up a meal. Arriving at Zuccotti for the first time on October 1, Squire, 31 years old and with a BA in sociology, said she’d spent the four years since graduation filling out applications for entry level jobs sometimes directly, but more often only vaguely, related to her degree. She’d gotten nothing, and her most recent job had been as a $150-a-week deliverer of sandwiches. In the park she recalled that she knew a lot about food: since age 14, she’d worked in restaurants, as a server and in the kitchen. She joined the OWS Kitchen Working Group.

The kitchen lay in the park’s center, and in its first weeks it stayed open 24/7, stocked with a glorious hodge-podge of donated food. A middle-aged woman from the Bronx brought a hefty pot of chili. “My husband’s in the Transport Workers Union,” she said, as though no further explanation was necessary. Others dropped by with fruit, bagels, cookies, hummus, casseroles. Responding to a list of nearby restaurants that delivered, posted on OWS’s Web site, the world used its credit cards to purchase take-out for the occupiers. The owner of Liberato’s Pizza, near Wall Street, told the New York Times he’d received orders from all over the U.S. and from Germany, France, England, Italy and Greece. The Kitchen Working Group’s Twitter account buzzed with exclamation marks and thank yous. “Fresh picked apples from Vermont!” enthused one tweet. “Shout out to Nancy in New Mexico for ordering us crazy good food from Katz’s Deli!”

In those early days, according to Heather, kitchen workers mostly opened boxes and washed dishes. But the impromptu nature of donations and deliveries made things touch and go. “WE NEED LUNCH!” one Kitchen Working Group tweet entreated. “SEND #OCCUPYWALLSTREET food!” WE’RE HUNGRY!” The occupation began giving the kitchen a budget of up to $1,500 a day for supplementary catering. Some volunteers started cooking in their own, small apartment kitchens. This was necessary because park rules forbade the use of flames to prepare food, and electrical power in Zuccotti was severely restricted.

Farmers helped the Kitchen Working Group to expand its menus. By October, fresh produce was being delivered in trucks dispatched from upstate New York, Western Massachusetts, and Vermont. Small, organic farms and distributors with names like Food Works, Littlewood, and Six Circles were banding together to send harvest to OWS and to the occupation in Boston. They organized a group and named it “Feed the Movement.” Emily Curtis-Murphy, of Fair Food Farms in East Calais, Vermont, made a video for Feed the Movement’s blog, saying, “Something’s got to change,” a sentiment felt by many of the farmers providing food to OWS. One of Emily’s concerns was that “All this consolidation of wealth isn’t doing anything to create jobs for people in the rural economy.”

The Zuccotti kitchen staff could slice and dice some farm donations—cucumbers, lettuce, carrots—and make cold salads on site. But Heather wanted to cook the squash, grain and meat, and to use the dairy products without worrying about spoilage. If the kitchen could cook this food, OWS could reduce catering costs and use the savings to reimburse the farmers. Heather began looking for a commercial kitchen with cold and hot storage. Out of the blue, a man named Leo Karl showed up at the information desk.

Leo is pastor of an evangelical church and director of Liberty Café, a soup kitchen in East New York, a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn. Every weekday morning, Liberty Café cooks nutritious, savory lunches for hundreds of poor diners. Leo volunteered to make available the café’s huge, well-equipped kitchen in the afternoon, so that OWS could prepare dinner.

Using Liberty Café’s facilities, OWS began cooking enormous quantities of food—enough to feed dinner to at least 1,500 people on weekdays, and 3,000 on weekends. The Sustainability Committee helped out with developing a dish washing system, so as to avoid the waste of using disposable plates. The same committee organized a system for getting rid of kitchen scraps, as Brennan Cavanaugh, one of its founders, explained: “With the amount of food that was coming in and the donations and the amount of food being prepared, there was a lot of food waste. It was actually my wife, Catherine’s idea to start creating compost buckets and start taking it out. Then it was my idea to start doing it on bicycles.”

Cavanaugh and company were soon collaborating with bike activists to form a bike brigade to remove compost. “We have two pickups a day, fourteen a week. Yesterday, we pulled out seven five-gallon buckets of food waste. And we figure those buckets weigh anything from 30 to 35 pounds each. So seven buckets is over two 200 pounds taken out a day.” The groups would bring food waste from Zuccotti to community gardens in the Lower East Side, including El Jardin Paraiso, Belinda M’Finda Kalunga Community Garden, La Plaza Cultural, the Lower East Side Ecology Center, and a compost farm called Earth Matter, on Staten Island. “They just make compost and they have chickens. They are a living farm. They come in on their own bike. And they pick up twice a week.”

Pedal power was also used to provide electricity for the kitchen, as well as for the rest of the park. “One of the first things we realized we had to do was to get everybody here off of fossil fuels. So we made an energy bike,” noted Keegan, of the Sustainability Committee. “Now we can pedal to power a deep cycle battery . . . We started powering some of the things this occupation needs like laptops, cell phones, and cameras. As soon as we plugged it in all the other committees approached us and said we need one too.”

Serious foodies were at this point becoming involved in the kitchen. One was Eric Smith, a former chef at Manhattan’s Midtown Sheraton hotel. Eric had been laid off, and he volunteered his culinary skills to OWS, as well as his experience cooking for very large groups. Erin Littlestar, meanwhile, had been preparing to be a chef but changed her plans. She told The Huffington Post she’d been scheduled to matriculate at the National Gourmet Institute, but never showed up to start classes after she spent a day in Zuccotti. “I just got this feeling like there was something bigger I was supposed to be doing than just going to school to learn chiffonade,” Erin said.

The New York Post, with typically snide hostility, ran a front page on a “typical” Occupy dinner, prepared in Brooklyn: organic chicken soup with root vegetables, parsley, rosemary and thyme; salad made with sheep’s-milk cheese and chimichurri sauce with a dash of garlic; spaghetti; brown rice; beans; and for dessert nuts and banana chips donated by a co-op in Ithaca.

Mocking the menu as snobbish, the Post overlooked two things. For one, the Brooklyn soup kitchen was serving poor people food similar to the OWS menu. And back at Zuccotti, OWS fare went not just to those long-familiar with goat cheese. The kitchen was feeding many far less affluent people. Including the homeless.

By late October, the kitchen working group was feeling overwhelmed by how poorly organized they were relative to the immense job they faced every day. Among the difficulties: a second prep kitchen had opened in Brooklyn, but assigned drivers sometimes didn’t show up at either kitchen, so the food sat and spoiled. Heather, and other Kitchen Work Group members, wanted desperately to regroup and fix things.

In late October they decided to take a three-day break to reflect and reorganize during which time they would serve the occupiers only “simplified meals” such as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But the kitchen’s difficulties got mixed with other problems. Some sexual assaults had occurred in Zuccotti. Drug and alcohol use was becoming more widespread. The Peace Council conferred with Kitchen, suggesting they serve meals for only two hours instead of round the clock, “to discourage people from coming to the camp all fucked up,” Heather recalled. When the Kitchen Working Group announced its “simplified” meal plan, on October 27, all hell broke loose. Failing to understand the group’s organizational problems, occupiers accused it of trying to starve out the homeless. “People started freaking out,” Heather reported. “There was almost violence.”

In the end, meal times were restricted, and diners had to stand in a long, snaking line to get their food. After the threeday “simplification,” the food returned to being as tasty and healthful as ever. And everyone ate.

At around 4 o’clock in the morning on November 15, Heather and two co-workers locked arms and sat down on the ground in a puddle of mustard and vinegar that had spilled from bottles smashed by the NYPD during that night’s eviction. They had spent their time at the occupation cooking, serving, and washing dishes, then cooking, serving, and washing some more. They were heroes of the kitchen, and perhaps appropriately, the last people in the park to be arrested.

The People’s Library

Within days of Zuccotti Park being first occupied, a few dozen books, magazines and pamphlets had been collected by one of the occupiers, a 27-year-old New York University librarian named Jez. He put them on a low wall of the park’s northeast perimeter, under a hand-painted sign reading, “Library.” A week later, those few dozen books had become hundreds, and by early October, volunteers–some of them professional librarians and some amateurs–were sorting, cataloguing, and marking each new item with a rubber stamp reading, “Occupy Wall Street Library.” Soon the library would boast 4,000 books, all donated: everything from The Essential Chomsky to The Letters of Allen Ginsberg to He’s Just Not that Into You.

Betsy Fagin, a founding OWS librarian, is a quiet woman with a halo of dark, curly hair. She lives in Brooklyn and has worked at several libraries, including the National Art Library in London. “I grew up in Washington, DC,” Fagin said, explaining how she got involved with the occupation. “My parents went to the MLK march. My father is black, my mother’s white. People told them, ‘You can’t have a child; it’s wrong and bad.’ I’m here.”

Betsy had never been an activist before Occupy Wall Street. Still, she’d had a premonition. “Honestly, it sounds kind of crazy, but I dreamed about this. Not in a conscious way, but literally, years before it happened. And then . . . it did happen.”

During the second week of the occupation, she “just got on a train and came over.” Immediately she was approached by a young man who invited her to play chess with him. “So we played. The feeling of this place, and how engaging everybody was, and the conversations we had, made me feel, ‘This is really important. I can help out here.’”

Looking for a way to make herself useful, Fagin spied the books. “I said, ‘I’m a librarian. I can organize books. At this time, organizing books is a revolutionary act.’” She next went to the General Assembly. “‘Hi everybody,’ I said, a little nervously, ‘I’m a librarian and I notice there’s a library and nobody’s taking charge of it and I’d be happy to if that’s cool.’ Everybody did the up sparkle finger thing, and that started the library as an official working group.”

Soon people began coming to Zuccotti expressly to work in the library. Some even arrived from out of town. One was Mandy Henk, from Greencastle, Indiana, almost 800 miles away. Mandy is a librarian at DePauw University, and she fits the librarian stereotype: she’s soft-spoken, bespectacled, and wears her hair pulled back. “I saw Betsy’s sign that said the library needed librarians. I’d been waiting for a movement to start for a good long while. So when it did it seemed only appropriate to go ahead and join it.”

Mandy made her first trip to OWS the weekend of the Brooklyn Bridge march, and her second on the occasion of her fall break. A third trip soon followed: “It’s about a 12-hour trip. We drove the first time with kids and dog in the car, dropped the kids and the dog off at grandma’s, and then my husband and I came out. I’ve flown since then.” She brought plastic boxes and tarps to protect books from rain and snow and sleeps in the library when she’s visiting. “It’s surprising how very similar it actually is to a regular library. The glamour is always in working with the people and not processing the books,” she says stamping books with a “People’s Library” stamp. “But I think it’s great. I think especially when there are professional librarians who can answer the more complex reference questions—we’ve got legal questions, medical questions, that sort of thing.”

Mandy is taking up the cause of Occupy within her profession. “We’re presenting at the ALA (the American Library Association). And we get a lot of people visiting the People’s Library blog, which I write for. So, more than bringing [Occupy] back to my geographic area, I’m working on communicating with the library profession.”

Another out-of-towner, William Scott, is lanky, with a long, studious face. He teaches English at the University of Pittsburgh and was able to volunteer because he was on sabbatical. When interviewed, he noted that his first book was about to be published that very week. He planned to donate it to the People’s Library. “It’s a dream come true,” he said.

Jaime, also a librarian, was proud of the way that Occupation principles were determining how library materials got handled.

“I tell new librarians they can shelve [a book] where they think it goes,” Jaime explained. “We don’t follow Dewey, we don’t follow Library of Congress. If I wander over and don’t think it goes there, I’ll put it somewhere else. Direct democracy. If something can go in economics or in women or history, I’ll say, “For this particular work, where do I think people will be most happy to find it?” The principle of use says, “Is this the way readers are actually going to use these books?” Certain novels should be shelved in [Young Adult] because every teenage girl I’ve known has found it to be their first exposure to erotica, even though it’s an adult novel –because the use is by teenage girls. They’ll be the ones happy to find it. If you put it in general fiction, no one will ever read it.”

The library working group created a poetry anthology, and worked in solidarity other actions around the country. “We’ve sent out stuff to other occupations,” Jaime said, “including to Philadelphia and Detroit.” The group also created a blog that contains a search engine for every book the librarians were able to catalogue and stamp. That wasn’t every item because sometimes people took books just as they came in, and never brought them back.

“Our circulation policy is, basically, if you want it and you feel like you need it in your heart, then take it. We ask that you leave a trade or bring it back,” Betsy explained. “The cynic in me is saying you can’t just give this away for free.” She recalled the time when someone came to the occupation library from a store that buys used books. He said he’d been getting a lot of books from people who’d taken them from the People’s Library and wanted to sell them. “My heart sank a little,” Fagin remembered. “But then somebody said, ‘If they’re selling the books they probably need the money.’ And the bookstore guy said, ‘We’re taking the books and bringing them back to you.’”

The librarians were frequently busy with reference chores. “People come in and are like, ‘I’m looking for something about renewable energy,’ and we’re finding the books and getting them information,” Betsy said. But all was not work. “Authors come through to donate their books and hang out and talk. Scott was thrilled when Angela Davis visited. So did Philip Levine, current poet laureate of the United States. He left one of his books, signed. The not-so-famous came, too, of course: “to chill out and to read and to think and to engage with each other and with the world, with all of human experience,” Betsy said. To her, the library was “the heart” of the community.

“This is a paradigm shift,” Betsy again, talking of everything going on in Zuccotti Park. “It’s the beginning—it’s not even the beginning, it’s been going on. But it’s accelerating. I just love it, and part of what I like is stamping the books so it says ‘Occupy Wall Street Library.’"

Not long after Betsy and her fellow workers were interviewed for this book, everyone and everything was evicted from Zuccotti Park. Of the 4,000 books tossed by police into garbage trucks and carted away, only 839 were recovered in usable condition from a city sanitation warehouse. A few others were found damaged beyond use from their trip in the trucks. The rest, over 3,000 items donated to the People’s Library, simply disappeared.

Legal

Occupy Wall Street is, at its heart, a movement rooted in the tradition of civil disobedience. Symbolic actions, often technically illegal, are the hallmark of a movement that started by claiming space for itself, with no permission sought, in the very center of world capitalism. In such a movement, legal counsel was likely to prove constantly necessary, and indeed it has: the frequency with which the movement has had to engage in legal struggles, both on the individual and the institutional level, convinced attorney and OWS participant Janos Marton of the necessity, as he put it, for Occupy Wall Street to keep its lawyers “in the loop” as much as possible. While perhaps less visible than the kitchens or the medical tent, the New York Occupy encampment, since its first weeks, boasted a working group dedicated to legal support, an activity that remained a vital part of life in Zuccotti throughout the occupation.

Janos, an attorney on the New York Bar, was an early member of the Legal working group. He heard about the Occupy Wall Street initiative before September 17 by way of Adbusters, but was only able to visit Zuccotti for the first time two days after the occupation began. Though initially thwarted by the non-hierarchical nature of OWS in his attempts to locate a contact person for the legal working group—there was no clear, single coordinator with whom to speak—by the second week of the occupation, and after a brief stint working in the People’s Library, he found what he was looking for. One evening in late September, at a coffee shop close to Zuccotti, he attended the second meeting of the recently-formed Legal working group.

“We try to meet weekly, and there’s always a pressing issue,” Janos said of the working group. The pressing issue at that first meeting he attended would remain a constant concern for Legal throughout the occupation—that of jail support. A serious problem facing the movement’s legal wing in its earliest days, Janos recalled, was that of getting lawyers access to arrested protesters: no police officer would simply grant cell access to a lawyer who presented herself at a precinct, armed only with the claim that she represented arrested protesters in police custody—full, legal names are a basic requirement for access to arrestees.

When, at the General Assembly a few days prior, on September 23, a call had gone out on the People’s Mic asking lawyers to volunteer to go help arrested protesters languishing in NYPD cells, Janos discovered that no one knew the names of any of the jailed individuals, and as a result, found himself unable to do anything to help them.

The meeting in the coffee shop had to resolve this issue and did so by setting up the jail support subgroup, charged with organizing and providing material as well as legal support for arrested OWS protesters. The meeting also created a lawyer relations subgroup, tasked with liaising with the Occupy Wall Street movement’s principal source of legal support, the National Lawyers’ Guild. One of its responsibilities was that of collecting and passing along the names of arrested OWS supporters.

The National Lawyers’ Guild has been the center of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s legal structure. It is a national organization of progressive and radical lawyers, with a long history of providing legal support to protests, particularly through its Legal Observers program. This program trains individuals on how to best observe a protest, taking good notes, so that potential arrests can be handled smoothly. Outfitted with highly visible neon-green Legal Observer baseball caps, National Lawyers’ Guild members have been a visible presence at every sizeable OWS action, keeping watch for any instances of police misconduct and taking down the names of arrested protesters. By the end of October the Guild had approximately 20 attorneys working on legal research and litigating on behalf of Occupy Wall Street.

Soon after its creation, the legal working group set up a table in Zuccotti. A legal support table already existed at the time, run by the National Lawyer’s Guild, but it was staffed only from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. limiting its usefulness. For three days, Janos took time off from the New York City law firm where he works to staff the working group’s new table, located beside the Media Relations station in the park’s north-east corner. Over the course of those three days, he listened to one heartbreaking story after another. Most, for instance those relating to home foreclosures, lay beyond the purview of the working group and Janos often found himself in the difficult position of being unable to do anything. On other occasions, however, especially on matters concerning arrests during protest actions, he was able to help.

By late October, Occupy Wall Street’s legal support structure had expanded, from an initial corps of around 10 in late September, to a total strength of 22 volunteers a month later, with perhaps 15 arguing cases at any one time. The lime-green caps of the National Lawyer’s Guild Legal Observers could be observed at virtually every major protest that the Occupy movement staged. On the actions of October 14, for example, they were present both in Zuccotti Park and at the marches on City Hall and Wall Street. On the latter march, one Legal Observer was run over by an NYPD scooter, an incident that was caught on film and rapidly gained notoriety on the Internet. Writing the Guild phone number on one’s forearm, and using it to contact the Guild after being arrested, became standard practice for protesters.

The legal working group’s relationship to the rest of the movement also evolved. Janos explained how: before October 20, the process by which individuals could take legal action on behalf of Occupy Wall Street was not well-organized. This sometimes resulted in ill-considered legal motions being filed on behalf of the movement that the General Assembly did not in fact support, and which could even prove embarrassing or damaging to OWS.

On October 20, the General Assembly passed a motion— which Janos supported—that required any legislation affecting the OWS community as a whole to be previously submitted to the GA for approval. This new system was not perfect, Janos acknowledged. At times, as he put it, legal matters require “fast turn-around,” to which the procedures of the General Assembly approval were not conducive, So, for example, while the National Lawyers’ Guild had sent the New York Fire Department a legally charged letter in late October in response to the FDNY’s removal of power generators from Zuccotti, moving forward with actual litigation still awaited General Assembly approval at the end of the encampment in mid-November. But overall, Janos considered the balancing act between efficiency and organization to be generally successful. On November 15, when Mayor Bloomberg at last sent in the NYPD to evict the OWS camp, the NLG responded by filing a restraining order.

The Media Center

Whether it was reporters from NY1, New York City’s local news channel, or journalists working for foreign news agencies such as the BBC, Spain’s La Sexta, or Al Jazeera, the Occupy Wall Street encampment found itself from its first days the target of frequent visits by members of the press. With journalists came questions—quickly, the Occupy movement realized it had need of articulate, informed supporters able to liaise with the press, answering the many questions that arose about a hard-tocategorize, leaderless, and ostensibly demand-less uprising. As a result, the Occupy movement moved early on to put together a Press Relations working group designated occupiers armed with information about the movement and drawn from within its ranks in the hope of communicating at least some truth about the encampment at Zuccotti through a media often characterized by misrepresentation and confusion.

Press Relations set its table up in the north eastern quarter of the park, amid a cluster of the most visible and important groups, including the People’s Library and the Legal working group. Mark Bray and Senia Barragán were two early members of the working group. Longtime activists and self-professed anarchists, the pair, who in daily life are History Ph.D. students, began participating in the Occupy movement from its first day, when, having learned of the occupation plans through Facebook, they joined OWS’s inaugural September 17 march on Wall Street. For Senia, in particular, joining Occupy Wall Street was not just about political belief, it was personal too. As she explained, her support for the movement was spurred by an occasion when her family’s home was nearly foreclosed upon as a result of a single late mortgage payment. Mark, meanwhile, felt he could best serve the movement by using the public speaking skills he had acquired teaching history to relay clear messages to the media.

As part of the Press Relations group, press interviews did, in fact, feature from the beginning as an important portion of both Mark and Sennia’s duties, so much so that they felt they could not camp in the park like other OWS participants. Serving as a representative of the movement before the press meant that they had to turn out every day well-groomed and dressed in clean clothing, which necessitated returning each evening to their apartment in Jersey City, NJ.

Interviews for the Press team were frequent—three per day, every day, by one estimate—and were with, as another member of the group, Jason Ahmadi described as “[the greatest] variety of journalists I’ve seen in my life,” spanning “everything you can possibly imagine.” One of the more high profile exchanges took place on October 16 when Mark participated in an interview with Al Jazeera, in which he exchanged opinions with independent stock trader Alessio Rastani, and offered a straightforward, two-part explanation of what the Occupy Wall Street movement sought: economic justice, and a more democratic, accountable form of politics that was beholden to citizens rather than to corporations.

Four days earlier, he had suggested to an interviewer from CNN Money that those who criticized the movement for lacking demands were missing the point—OWS was seeking a conversation about the current state of the country, not presenting a finite list of goals. “Making a list of three or four demands,” he asserted, “would have ended the conversation before it started.”

On November 14, the day before the NYPD eviction, Mark was again in the news, this time speaking to the progressive journalism Web site Nation of Change, discussing why he foresaw that Occupy Wall Street would not consent to align itself with any existing political party. When occupiers were at last temporarily evicted from Zuccotti Park on November 15, Mark spent the early morning hours between roughly 1 a.m., when the eviction took place, and sunrise, shuttling back and forth between his New Jersey apartment and Zuccotti, talking to the news teams that had parked their vans along the street along the southern edge of the park. The following day he held a telephone interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, during which he refuted the assertion, made by AIG Chairman Steve Miller, that OWS protesters held “unsophisticated” views on the relationship between Wall Street and broader, “Main Street,” prosperity in America.

Senia Barragán, meanwhile, had no shortage of interviews herself, though due to family obligations, she could not come to Zuccotti Park daily. In the wake of Occupy Wall Street’s successful October 14 standoff with Brookfield Properties, she spoke with Al Jazeera, calling Brookfield Properties’ retreat a “big victory” for the Occupy movement, and told Time Magazine that, “ . . . this was never about sanitation. It was about a pretext for eviction.” One month later, in her capacity as an OWS spokeswoman, she spoke to NBC New York on the morning of the November 17 Day of Action, as protesters attempted to block entry onto Wall Street, as well as with the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

In addition to interviews, Senia was also busy with a Press Relations working group project to create a list of spokespeople drawn from Occupy Wall Street’s various minority groups. In this way the Press team hoped to increase its own diversity and bring more underrepresented voices into contact with the media covering OWS. At first, she explained, the Press team had been overwhelmingly white and male, something that ran counter to Occupy Wall Street’s practice of privileging the voices of historically disenfranchised and persecuted groups. Senia, of Colombian heritage, was, she recalled, the first person of color involved with Press Relations, and had, at first, not been taken seriously by members of the Press, though she made a special effort to dress professionally. She explained that the working group had grown markedly more diverse as a result of an ongoing effort to bring in new people, and the list of minority spokespersons was only growing.

The sort of questions and answers that Press team members such as Barragán, Bray, and Ahmadi offered in these interviews were reflective of the horizontal, demand-less nature of the movement. Many of the Press team’s answers were descriptive, rather than presenting an analysis of the movement. They steered members of the press toward Occupy participants from whom they could get the specific answers they wanted, or answered questions about the movement themselves, but were careful not to phrase their own expectations of the movement, their own goals, as things that the movement as a whole embraced. As Press team member Jason put it, in situations where “messaging” questions come up in press interviews—questions about the message of the movement, its goals or expectations for the future— “we are very clear about saying ‘I’ statements: using ‘I believe this,’ ‘I want,’ ‘these are my goals.’” Most commonly, the questions press team members received were ones like, “When are you leaving?” “What are you going to do for the winter?” “What are your goals?” and, similarly, “Why are you here?” However, on occasion, some outlandish and off-topic issues also came up, as when one journalist asked Jason about his love life. This particular question was a point of pride for Ahmadi, as he, by his own reckoning, “flipped the question on her,” moving the conversation to her relationship with a physician who had children, and her opinion that there were no good men to date in New York City.

Press relations, however, was just one dimension of a larger and ongoing project —that of reaching out and spreading the message of OWS to the public beyond the park. Another, perhaps unlikely collaborator in increasing the transparency of the movement and connecting outsiders with events transpiring inside was a 27-year-old Twitter user, a man, who went by the handle DiceyTroop, and was responsible for providing live, realtime reports via Twitter of the business being handled at Occupy Wall Street’s nightly General Assembly meetings.

As was the case for Senia, DiceyTroop’s motives for first getting involved with Occupy Wall Street were personal as well as political, rooted in his own biography: a native of Foxboro, Massachusetts, he had been raised in the Unitarian Universalist church, and as a young man had helped organize a radical youth organization within the church that had, among other measures, embraced the consensus model of discussion and decision-making. When DiceyTroop first witnessed a General Assembly, his brain, as he put it, “exploded”—here were hundreds successfully using the consensus model outside and in public, when he had only ever seen it operating in “enclosed radical cirles.”

Fascinated, he tweeted a report of the General Assembly that evening on his regular Twitter account, only to have the main OWS Twitter account, and then 70 other accounts, retweet it. Realizing the need he had discovered—no record of the General Assembly’s proceedings had to that point existed on Twitter— he returned the next night to live-tweet the whole event. He continued to do this for several weeks until, made uncomfortable by the number of Twitter followers that DiceyTroop as an individual had acquired, followers that according to him “really belonged to the movement,” he helped build a “Twitter Team” that has since taken over live-tweeting GA business under the collective handle LibertySquareGA.

Meditation Space

At the intersection of Liberty and Trinity, a few paces into the northwest corner of Liberty Square, stands a tree surrounded by low granite benches. These benches form a ring around the tree, making it the focal point of the seating area. The tree is a London plane, a hybrid species that resulted from the combination of an oriental plane and the American sycamore. Most trees within the city parks of New York are peculiar reminders of the concrete jungle that surrounds them; there’s nothing natural about a tree emerging from polished granite. Yet this hybridized flora was one of the focal points of the OWS encampment at Liberty Square. Away from the hustle and bustle of the assembly area, the kitchen, and the dozens of other working groups, the Tree of Life (as it was renamed by the occupants) became the spiritual center of the park. There was an earlier testament to its significance too: the tree survived the collapse of the World Trade Center just a block away on 9/11.

In the weeks prior to the occupation of Zuccotti Park, members of Meditation Flash Mob (MedMob for short), a holistic community that has been producing events in the NYC area for years, meditated on Wall Street outside the NY Stock Exchange. They also held public meditations at Union Square and Washington Square Park. Anthony Whitehurst, a member of MedMob, described the collective as a collaborative effort of many individuals, with about 10–12 active facilitators in the group. He added that MedMob’s structure is intended to be universal: “It includes chanting the sound of ohm, silent meditation, and playing music.” Following a Flash Mob meditation on October 5, members of MedMob and the Consciousness Working group, among other groups in the community, created the beginnings of the community altar. Charlie Gonzalez, a founder of the Consciousness Group, created a sign declaring the London plane as the “Tree of Life, a community sacred space.” Within a few days, the space began to flourish.

The Sacred Space, as it is designated on the map of Zuccotti Park, was used for self-reflection, yoga, chanting, prayer, and meetings with a spiritual focus. When speaking to the participants involved in the creation of the space, they made clear that it was not owned or defined by any one group. Rather, as Charlie put it, it was “a collective shared space that many different groups can work with in their own ways, and all of whom will have their own views and opinions.”

The initial altar at the Tree of Life was handmade and donated by an OWS supporter. Occupier and New York native Michael Rodriguez was often to be found at the tree. He built a second altar, and both he and Brendan Butler, another member of the Consciousness group, looked after its general upkeep and design for most of the days that it was up. Rodriguez and Butler were often referred to as the guardians of the altar. It was around this altar that members of the public and the Occupy Wellness Group (including MedMob, Occupy Yoga, the Interdependence Project, and other groups) organized and maintained 58 days of continuous prayer, twice daily meditation, music, interfaith practices, worship, and community discussions. Occupiers and visitors alike contributed a myriad of objects to the altar: sage, flowers, candles, Buddha statues, Hindu deities, Day of the Dead decorations, peace signs, crucifixes, Balinese masks, rosaries, rose petals, malas, stones, feathers, shells, crystals, incense, candles, figurines, Buddhas, photos of spiritual teachers, signs and art work.

In the daily life of OWS, the Sacred Space offered a refuge from crowds and chaos, a place for occupiers to pause and reflect on their feelings and priorities. The benches also provide a place for tired tourists and visitors to sit and interact with occupiers. On October 28, Brendan, created a Facebook page for the Tree of Life. On its page, the tree is described as “A community altar and sacred space dedicated to unifying the 100%.” Fateh Singh of Occupy Yoga added that it “served as a symbol—a real touchstone—for those who believed in something greater than themselves. In that way, it was perfect a spiritual centerpiece of the Occupy Movement, and a material representation of awareness.” One or two weddings were even conducted at the Tree of Life, a testament to its place in the movement. Charlie commented, “The beauty of the ‘Tree of Life’ concept is that it is not from one religion or dogma, but is prevalent in all traditions, and even science, as a symbol of our interconnectedness.”

It was significant that the Tree of Life stood within view of the new One WTC tower, and only a few blocks from the 9/11 Memorial. Though this was sometimes forgotten in the commotion of the Square, Lisa Montanarelli, a facilitator of the Meditation Group, found that people often commented on it in the discussions following meditation sessions. The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center were also seen as anti-capitalist protests, targeting the symbols of U.S. economic might. Those who recognized this correlation believed that the memory of the attacks made OWS more consciously nonviolent and inclusive of religious diversity. While 9/11 was often framed as a religious war between Christians and Muslims, or a “clash of civilizations” between the Euro-American West and the Arab world, OWS traced its roots to the Arab Spring and promoted solidarity with similar anti-corporate protests worldwide, regardless of national borders or religious differences.

As the occupation developed, the Consciousness Group grew, drawing in members from MedMob and many other organizations. The working group promoted a variety of activities including a spirit-based women’s circle, a men’s circle, Angel Walks, Meditation, Individual Energy Healings, non-violent communication to police, and Channeling and Spiritual Warrior Work. As its larger mission, the group supported events and ideas that promoted raising group consciousness at Occupy Wall Street. According to its members, this was why the activities of the group had such range and variety.

The Wellness Working Group emerged from the efforts of individuals like Fateh Singh of Occupy Yoga, who tried to get all the groups to work together. The group had organized only a few meetings when the park was evicted. It was an inclusive, unifying group that emphasized mindfulness. The Interdependence Project, a nonprofit with a secular approach to Buddhist meditation, launched its daily meditations on October 18. In particular, Adreanna Limbach of the Interdependence Project put great effort into organizing the daily sits and creating the Meditation Working Group. The Interdependence Project works to cultivate an understanding of the connection between personal transformation practices and social transformation through ongoing workshops related to Art, Activism, Meditation and Buddhist Philosophy & Western Psychology. The group’s meetings included Buddhists from a variety of traditions, and secular mindfulness practitioners. The meetings were likely more diverse, but the group didn’t ask about spirituality or religious affiliations.

Members of the Wellness Group continue to speak about how they might introduce secular mindfulness practices into the GA meetings and working group procedures–to facilitate non-violent communication, deep listening, and compassion for oneself and others. One of the goals of the group was to provide a space for people to confront existing differences, rather than suppress them. The Meditation sessions put individuals in touch with their responses to particular issues in a non-violent, non-confrontational setting. This avoided immediate reactions, which were often based on misunderstanding and could lead to larger disagreements.

The daily meditations were small, but evidently beneficial. The Meditation Working Group offered hour-long sessions every weekday from 3:30 to 4:30 and weekends from 1:00 to 2:00. The meditation facilitators came from two groups: the Interdependence Project and MedMob. The daytime facilitators rotated daily, and the meditations often included walking meditation and seated guided meditation. Facilitators provided instruction beginning with shamatha, (which involved bringing awareness to the breath, noticing when the mind wandered, and bringing it back) and a lovingkindness meditation (where participants started with love for themselves and loved ones and gradually expanded outward to include all beings).

Well-known individuals within the New York spiritual community supported the meditations at Zuccotti. The Meditation group coordinated public speaking appearances by Robert Thurman, founder of Tibet House; Russell Simmons participated in one of the group meditation circles; and Deepak Chopra led a group meditation at the square. The most common feedback facilitators heard was that the meditation helped participants gain distance from strong emotions; they had a choice whether or not to act upon their anger, for instance. On several occasions, one of the participants had been ready to attack another protestor at their next working group meeting and decided, after the meditation, to approach them more empathically instead.

Additionally, MedMob offered silent meditations as opposed to facilitated classes. Charlie Gonzalez described his role outside the MedMob meditations: “Most of the time I floated around the park to de-escalate different situations, talk with people individually to practice active listening and share ideas, and to remind everyone that we are already free and we do not need to demand anything from anyone to realize our own liberation. I was not there to protest. I was there to co-create a new world.” Charlie had noticed a global shift in consciousness; that is, people were starting to realize they were not as alienated as they believed, but part of a larger interconnectedness.

John Paul Learn, also a MedMob member, emphasized the role of group meditations in attracting individuals to participate in OWS: “the group meditations showed an intention and action that went beyond non-violence and truly embraced and embodied compassion.” At their largest, group meditations involved over 200 people, all focusing their “altruistic attention in a communal area, seemingly non-religious or non-spiritual in its actual physical makeup, and showing that locations and the people in them can literally be transformed into a sacred space . . . if we allow ourselves to do so,” Learn said. In their words, meditation was a form of indirect action.

Following some of the Meditation sessions, facilitators led group discussions that addressed healthy approaches to handling the various challenges the occupation presented. After a particular session, Lisa Montanarelli recalled hearing a reference to the “Upper East Side Sacks.” The individual who said this was referring to the class divides that had emerged in the park. Lisa had just led a Buddhist lovingkindness meditation, which involved visualizing someone who was difficult or challenging and extending love to that person. Afterward, as the participants discussed anger, a young Latino occupier named David brought up how conflict between the “Haves” and “Have-nots” had spread throughout the park: “If you look at the south[east] side of the park, they’re all white and educated. There’s one sleep camp—they call themselves the ‘Upper East Side Sacks.’ There are few people of color sleeping on the south side, but they’re educated too. Meanwhile, the north[west] is all black and Latino. It’s just like New York City.”

The group then spoke about how OWS was an effort to create a community where people took care of (and cared about) each other, but everyone needed to change themselves so they didn’t replicate the same class and racial hierarchies that exist in the society from which they came. Sia, a black woman in her early twenties, said, “We can create a different structure on the outside of things, but unless we change the view from inside, nothing actually changes.”

Occupy Yoga also played a role in the life of the sacred space. A group of Kundalini Yoga teachers began leading nightly yoga classes in Zuccotti Park on October 11 a class which debuted with 100 yogi participants, and, at the time of writing, has been there every night since. It offered Kundalini Yoga meditation classes from 6–7p.m. around the Tree Of Life. The group was founded by Fateh Singh and Hari Simran Khalsa, but worked with a rotation of teachers, including several elder teachers— both local and out of state—who had studied directly with Yogi Bhajan. Some teachers, like accomplished musical guest yogi Sat Kartar Kaur, came from as far away as California, just to lead a single night class and serve the Occupy Movement.

On some rainy days, members of the movement incorporated creative actions, like serving food, tea or helping clean the camp, to help facilitate the goals of unity and peaceful protest. Occupants recalled seeing yogis leading the active meditative practice in the square, where the participants and visitors alike rolled out their mats, or stood around the group and followed along. Fateh Sigh described his experience of the nightly classes: “We had 30–40 people every night and we always had classes in the circle, and in the circle everyone was welcome who wanted to join in.”

After the eviction on November 15, Michael Rodriguez, Brendan Butler and Charlie Gonzalez went to the sanitation facility and retrieved one tattered Quan Yin statue. Everything else seemed to have been destroyed, including three relics (one of them a large Tibetan thangka and a mask from Bali). Charlie suggested that group members put together a protest petition that the whole group could get behind, and reach out to spiritual leaders of all wisdom traditions to sign the document. He also proposed that the Consciousness Group invite leaders in the community to come out to hold a press conference and event to rebuild the altar. For many people, the objects destroyed were sacred. Fateh Singh characterized the destruction of the altar as “the disrespect of people’s religious freedom to express themselves.” It was proposed by Charlie that the Consciousness Group take legal action regarding the desecration of the altar. “Our goal is to re-establish a setting for us to maintain a sacred space for the open public. We hope to have a way of gathering the spirit of all religious and faith-based approaches—to congregate, build community and improve our human relationships moving collectively towards a better future,” Singh said.

Rebeka Beiber, who has been participating since the second week of OWS with MedMob, the Consciousness Group and lately the Meditation Working Group, added that “with the eviction comes a practice of non-attachment and a shift from attachment to ‘place’ and a greater focus on creativity.” Those participating, organizing and facilitating the within the larger Wellness Group seemed to understand that the integration of past, present and future was essential to their process. This connectivity resulted from the group’s fundamental belief that a peace-full person first, a peace-full collective second leads to a peace-full earth. “What is remarkable about OWS is just how quickly we adapt and HOW we are adapting,” Beiber said.

To those involved in the Consciousness Group, and the OWS movement in general, the Tree of Life was a direct expression of the people’s collective spiritual intentions and right to Freedom of Religion. It was an inclusive, open, and collaborative creation, made from hundreds of individual’s donations, time, and effort. It became a peaceful meeting space for reflection and prayer from its humble beginnings, and was a place of solace and quietude within the plaza. John Paul Learn expressed that “these actions helped to create a more participatory, inclusive environment within the movement and helped to broaden the scope of the voices being heard.”

Medic tent

As soon as the occupation of Zuccotti Park got underway, a small and dedicated group of street medics emerged to look after the health of the protesters. Street medics have been a part of protest culture since the Civil Rights movement of the midsixties, when protesters discovered that a sympathetic medical presence was indispensable to their cause. It was evident then that protesters facing police brutality could not expect an adequate medical response from authorities. The protesters a half decade ago also found that, as the 1966 Orientation Manuel for the Medical Committee for Human Rights (one of the first voluntary activist medical groups) put it, “actual violence seems to occur less often if it is known that medical professionals are present.” Loosely organized and locally autonomous, street medics became an indispensable part of the tradition of American dissent. They were very active in protests against the Vietnam War, in the American Indian Movement, in the Black Panther party, and a wide range of political dissent in the latter 20th century. Tom Hayden, the Students for Democratic Society activist who has trained as a medic, explained that “there was a need for an alternative to hospitals. The police would go to hospitals looking for fugitives to arrest.”

Previous to Occupy Wall Street, the defining moment of latter day street medicine was the protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999. In the wake of those protests, medics organized collectives and began to train more people to offer medical treatment in crisis situations. These collectives have had a largely unacknowledged role in many major events. They were represented on the flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza in May 2010 when Israel killed nine activists. They have established permanent clinics in New Orleans and in other areas underserved by the established system.

The animating belief of street medicine is that medical care is a human right, and should be freely and immediately available to everyone. Some of the medics who formed the core of the team at Zuccotti Park, including Pauly Kostora, were the most dedicated caregivers in the wake of the hurricanes and earthquake in Haiti. Pauly told me that experience gave him a sense of perspective and scale that made his work in Zuccotti Park seem, in contrast, quite straightforward.

On September 17, Pauly and a handful of other medics were on hand at the beginning of the occupation, armed with only basic supplies–bandages, disinfectant, gauze. They were the only part of the occupation that had to be active and in service 24 hours a day, and so were happy to accept offers of help from anyone who wanted to be involved. Breanna Lembitz, a 21-year-old who joined the occupation a few days later and who subsequently became deeply involved in other aspects of the movement, remembered with fondness her first day with the medical team: “They had three arrests that day, and they worried they wouldn’t have enough manpower if everyone kept getting arrested. At that point it was me, one other girl, Lily [Johnson] and six other guys. So it was like me and a bunch of brothers.”

The medic area was the first location in the park to be blocked off from the rest of the community’s space, a move that caused some contention among the egalitarian-minded protesters. But having a dedicated area to treat and support the community’s health became a foundation of the occupation at Liberty Park.

On September 23, the medic team put out a call to action for medics around the country, and qualified medical professionals streamed in to the square to help. Among those who answered the call was Ed Mortimer, who became the point person for drug and alcohol interventions, and Frank White, a mental health specialist. They told me how they felt inspired by the wide support the medic team received. They had the regular assistance of licensed doctors and nurses, some of whom took time off from their work at hospitals such as the Woodhull Hospital and who were able to write needed prescriptions in the park itself. “Everyone works to their own qualifications,” explained Miriam Rocek, another member of the medic team.

Medics have a different role in marches and direct actions than the protesters. They are to remain neutral. Although the medical tent sports a banner that demands free healthcare for all, because, as Pauly said, “that’s our issue,” when medics don the red or red-and-black crosses that differentiate themselves from protesters, they assume the responsibility to provide immediate medical care for anyone around them who needs it, whether they are protester, cop, or bystander. They can also act as neutral observers of the action–Ed told me that on the strength of his status as a medic during the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge, he was able to push past the first cordon of police officers to closely observe the arrests and ensure that the protesters were not abused.

Near 11:30 at night on Monday, October 10, a police lieutenant roughly woke up Ed Mortimer while he slept right next to the medical tent. The police were mobilizing to confiscate the tent. As the cops moved in, medics and protesters formed a human chain around the area. As his arms locked with his comrades, Ed looked to his left and saw Jesse Jackson clambering over a flowerbed to join in. Jackson locked arms with the protesters, saying, “I’m not visiting, I’m occupying.” Seeing the determination of the movement to maintain its medical facilities, the police backed down and dispersed.

Medics have been essential in caring for injuries resulting from police brutality. Street medics have developed an effective treatment for pepper spray: antacid mixed with water, which has saved people’s eyesight. One medic described patching up a protester who was caught in a crowd panicked by the police’s use of teargas, another stitched up wounds incurred at the wrong end of a police baton.

Along with hypothermia and trenchfoot (stinkfoot), one of the central problems that the medic team faced in the park itself was the issue of mental health. Breanna described one man’s psychic breakdown in detail: he hadn’t slept in days due to the drumming, and he thought that her soothing hand was killing him by stealing what remained of his energy. The medic team comforted him, and eventually got him to sleep the man quickly became integrated into the community as a member of the sustainability committee. Pauly explained to one reporter, “The distress of sleeping on the street and experiencing sleep deprivation can lead to a whole series of medical issues.”

But not all of the mental health and addiction issues that the medical team confronted in the park were a product of the occupation itself. As Frank put it to me, the protesters “are fighting against a system that has been beating them down all their lives, and that can lead to emotional problems.” In a series of ways, the medic team was mopping up after a broken society and a broken healthcare system.

Many protesters in Zuccotti saw the presence of free and open healthcare in the park as a living reinforcement to their political positions; the fact that they would provide a service that was utterly lacking in the society at large was a visceral indictment of capitalism and for-profit healthcare. Maria Fehling, a nurse with National Nurses United, said, “We see a lot of people who otherwise have not sought out healthcare in five, six years because they have no insurance.”

When the NYPD raided the encampment in the early hours November 15, they confiscated a vast quantity of the medical supplies the team had stockpiled over the course of the occupation. The medics were left with what they started: the most basic supplies that they could carry on their person. They tried to reclaim anything they could from the NYPD, but the police had destroyed their two defibrillator units and any other equipment that was breakable. Nonetheless, the medics continue to evolve with the movement, fully committed. “I’m cold, wet and invisible,” Ed said, “but it’s the best time of my life.”