At the Edge of the Square

“I tried to sell good derivatives, I tried to sell good derivatives, derivatives aren’t inherently bad!”

—An investment banker making a late night visit to the OWS Information Desk at the east end of Zuccotti Park

Shortly after the October snow—which blanketed the encampment in an inch of slush—an elderly couple approached William Scott as he sat on the edge of the eastern sidewalk, near the People’s Library. “I know everybody’s thinking about the same thing, but I am so worried about you guys,” the woman said in her thick Queens accent. “This winter: How are you going to survive it? How are you going to stay here with the storms, with the snow?” Scott replied, “We stayed here the other night with that Nor’easter.” But his response did little to obviate her concern. “That’s what I’m saying! That’s not healthy for you guys!” The woman’s husband then pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and insisted on making a donation so that Scott and the other occupiers could buy “those silver things!” by which he meant space blankets.

***

After September of 2011, as occupiers settled on Zuccotti’s granite walkways, the park came to be cordoned from the smooth ebb and flow of daily foot traffic. The NYPD lined the park’s surrounding streets with portable metal fencing, open only at street intersections, effectively using the park’s surrounding sidewalks as buffer zones between what had become Liberty Plaza and the police lines. Over the course of the two-month encampment, as Zuccotti blossomed into a full-fledged micro-city, these sidewalk no-man’s-lands came to serve as vibrant zones of contact, where occupiers and opportunists intermingled with casual visitors as well as with the police.

Far from a homogenous buffer, the four sidewalks that make up Zuccotti’s perimeter quickly took the form of distinct zones, each with different sorts of interactions, shaped by particularities in the internal organization of the occupation itself.

The sidewalk along Cedar Street, on the park’s southern edge and abutting the sleeping area, was relatively quiet, the interactions there, for the most part, muted in tone and commercial in nature. The south side saw a much lighter police presence than did the park’s other sidewalks, and, but for the occasional news crew which sometimes parked their vans along Cedar, tended to be sparsely populated by a few halal food and coffee carts near Broadway and a sporadic souvenir vendor here and there (yes, they capitalized on OWS too). One airbrush artist set up a makeshift T-shirt business on the park’s south side, in one instance customizing a shirt that read “Occu-Princess” for a little girl visiting the encampment with her mother.

Depending on the time of day, or constantly in the early weeks of the occupation, the closer one got to Trinity Place, walking along the park’s southern sidewalk, the louder became the PULSE—the occupy drummers, who had claimed the steps on the park’s west side. The drummers’ location, combined with the Tree of Life and community altar (piled high with candles, beads, plants, fruit and burning sage incense) near Zuccotti’s northwest corner, gave the park’s western edge a more spiritual vibe. But that didn’t stop the occasional dance party from breaking out. One evening in early October, a group of bicyclists from Times Up! (a New York-based environmental group advocating direct action) descended on the park’s western edge with a special “sound bike”—pumping Jay-Z, New Order, James Brown and Public Enemy tunes as occupiers danced, let off a little steam and chanted, “All day! All week! Occupy the beats!” Brennan Cavanaugh, an OWS activist who helped organize the impromptu dance party, recalled, “This was before they had all the barricades up around the park, and you could come and go easily. There were still no walls, and people just started running out, and running along side us pumping their fists in the air!” Eventually, police pushed the dancers down the block, and within a matter of days the barricades along Trinity were set.

The drummers and sacred space made the park’s western sidewalk highly popular among tourists, who could often be seen snapping photos or stopping to chat with the hare krishnas in their white robes. This tourist presence usually brought a handful of sign-holders to the park’s western edge—protesters, some from within the park, some visiting in solidarity, who left their mark on the occupation with pithy appeals scrawled on just about anything. Pizza boxes were a particularly common material. At first this was just because there were so many of them around, but as the pizza box sign attained an iconic status within the movement, Amy Roberts, a part-time public librarian and an OWS archivist explained, visitors looking to leave their personal stamp on Zuccotti began to “make a point of doing it on the pizza boxes.” Said Roberts, who collected many of the signs left behind by visitors to the park.”They’re all hand-made, not sort of pre-packaged . . . It’s actually interesting because some of the signs I’ve seen I haven’t heard people say, but I wish they would. But maybe that’s the way they express their voice, is in making a sign. So, to me it’s like a really big part of how the movement expresses itself.”

The number of sign-holders increased as one turned the corner onto Zuccotti’s northern sidewalk. Liberty Street, the park’s northern boundary, featured a most dramatic staging of police presence that included dozens of officers and a wide-array of NYPD vehicles at all times, a show of force that often completely closed the street to through-traffic. By mid-October, police had erected a portable surveillance tower, which some in the Class War Camp, a makeshift anarchist info shop in the park’s western interior, dis-affectionately called the “Star Wars tower.” Along the park’s northern sidewalk, many occupiers responded to the pseudo-militarized space on the other side of the barricades with an almost quotidian protest idiom. Pedestrians attempting to scurry past Zuccotti along this sidewalk would spy occupying buskers, who often sat along the northern sidewalk playing folk tunes on guitar and collecting money for laundry. One chilly October late afternoon, a grandmother sat with a similarly gray-haired friend knitting hats, scarves and mitts for the occupiers, all while facing a line of New York’s Finest who killed time waiting for their shift along the barricades to end. Among other things, the grandmother’s sign included a list of “wants”: “End the war(s) _ Abolish the Death Penalty _ Increased taxes on the wealthiest (tax equity) _ A better America for my grand kids please.”

As the weather began to cool in late October, and the police and fire departments began confiscating gasoline-powered generators, the park’s northern sidewalk came to feature a row of stationary bikes, which visitors and occupiers alike took turns riding in order to power manual generators. This frequently brought a crowd of onlookers, who mingled in conversation with fellow onlookers and occupiers alike. While most sign-holders along the park’s northern sidewalk angled for photographers, many also actively engaged in these conversations. One regular, a 20-something Brooklyn resident named Jose, who sported a mustache-goatee combo, his Marine dog tags and a cardboard sign proclaiming “END THE FED,” was one sign holder who actively sought conversation with passers-by. “I’ve been talking about End The Fed here ever since this started on the 17th,” said Jose one evening in early October. “I figure why sit around and watch movies, this is the place to be right now.”

While sign-holders and conversations were certainly present on the park’s western and northern sidewalks, they became especially concentrated on the park’s northeastern corner. A raised planter along the park’s northern sidewalk approaching Broadway, in particular, became a focal point for sign-holders, who used the low marble wall as a perch from which to draw attention. One such sign holder, a man with tennis-ball yellow hair and a bright orange jacket, sat on the wall one October evening with a sign reading, “Yet Another Green Haired Deer Hunting Real Estate Redeveloper in Support of OWS.” Others taped signs to the wall—signs bearing slogans such as “Shut Down Indian Point,” “For A Nuclear Free Carbon Free Future,” “Radical Joy For Hard Times [featuring a line drawing of a swallow swooping toward a jagged nest].” Also taped to the wall one could at times find political cartoons, as well as signs perhaps taped in lieu of the vigorous debates they might otherwise provoke—like one promoting a “First in the Nation Caucus Occupation,” during the Iowa Caucuses in January, and others by a conspiracy theorist called Jeff Boss, who believed the National Security Administration was involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks and claimed that the OWS camp’s food had been tainted with a slow-acting poison.

The corner, which attracted many tourists and photographers, also served as a space for the public reclaiming of symbols. In addition to several waving American flags, Stephen, a Latino student of politics and business at LaGuardia Community College, waved a yellow Gadsden Flag—the yellow flag, bearing a rattlesnake and the phrase “Don’t Tread On Me,” which had of late become synonymous with the Tea Party movement. Speaking in a hoarse voice, which suggested he had been defending his choice of flag for hours, even days, Stephen said, “The reason I came with this flag is because this is the first flag our country united under to fight against imperialism, so this is very significant to me. Not only that, but the Tea Party movement, corporate elite, the captains of industry, international bankers, all these people have hijacked our government, hijacked our country and hijacked America and we’re taking it back! This doesn’t belong to the Tea Party! They have not been tread on; they don’t care about their country, they care about their bank accounts!”

Stephen spoke in a fast, indefatigable cadence, making it difficult to get a word in edge-wise. Such a pattern of speech was not uncommon among the regulars of the park’s eastern sidewalk, which became an epicenter of fevered conversations and debates. The sidewalk, running alongside Broadway, sat elevated above the rest of Zuccotti park, which lay at the bottom of stairs at the sidewalk’s edge—creating a backdrop effect that displayed the whole eastern half of the park, making it photogenic and a space much utilized by journalists conducting interviews. Protesters and visitors clearly wishing to be interviewed, or at least to be engaged with, tended to amass on the park’s eastern sidewalk, creating a teeming scene that served as a magnet for conservatives and bankers trying to better understand the occupiers, or perhaps to try their hand at proving them wrong. At times, such interactions became heated to the point of near violence. One mid-October evening a middle aged occupier, wearing all denim and sporting a red bandana around his neck, was roused to anger by a fellow middle-aged Long Islander who had used the phrase “you liberals” during their discussion—fighting words for the self-described socialist who tensed up in preparation for fisticuffs, before his unintentional instigator walked away, finding a fight not worth his time.

Daniel Levine, a 22-year-old student at Baruch College who often manned the OWS Information Desk on the eastern sidewalk, had a front-row seat for many of these altercations, verbal and otherwise. “Somebody punched this man in a skirt in the face,” Levine recalled. “We had to call a mic check and form a human wall around him. We’ve had a couple of incidents like that in front of the table because we’re right on the street so people—I guess people that want to instigate are too lazy to come into the square so they come over here.” A self-proclaimed conversationalist and lover of stories, Levine would often man info desk east for as many as 18 hours at a stint. While the work suited Levine, the information desk could prove too intense for some—as it often meant exposing oneself to a highly concentrated dose of the heated interactions on the park’s eastern edge. William Scott, an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburg who dabbled in working at the info desk before joining the staff of the People’s Library, said the work drove him nuts. “It’s just this never-ending stream of people asking stuff. And about one in every five questions is a legitimate question that actually has something to do with us,” Scott recalled. “The other four of the five are like, ‘So what the hell are you guys doing down here anyway?’”

But if the eastern sidewalk attracted those with questions about and critiques of the occupation, it also served as a site of absolution. Levine recalled one late-night visit by investment bankers: “I guess they heard the drumming all day and it was this tell-tale-heart sort of thing and they just felt really guilty they were giving me this, ‘I tried to sell good derivatives, I tried to sell good derivatives, derivatives aren’t inherently bad!’” Levine said. “And then they gave like 20 bucks to the donation bin. It was very odd, it was like a confessional booth at night here the first couple of weeks.”

After more than a month staffing the desk, Levine confessed that he rarely went into Liberty Plaza much anymore—his daily life as part of Occupy Wall Street, as he put it, revolved not around the kitchens, or the General Assembly, and certainly not around PULSE’s drumming. His life, as he put it “revolves around this table.”

Others based on the periphery still felt engaged with the rest of the Square. Patricia, a Chilean woman volunteering with the Información en Español working group, said her morning destination was also a desk—the working group’s pamphlet-strewn table along the walkway at the south-eastern corner of the park, near the red statue—but she, unlike Levine, typically began her day by taking a walk around the park to get a feel for what was going on that day, always followed by a visit to the Info/Media booth just inside the square from the People’s Library in the park’s north-eastern quadrant.

The interactions along the park’s sidewalks were always framed by the police presence. While cross-barricade conversations were common along the northern and eastern sidewalks, they mostly consisted of tourists requesting directions to the Century 21 department store a block to the north, or to Ground Zero, or to the nearest restroom. On occasion, however, the significance of the state power represented by the barricades—if not the actual metal fences themselves—seemed to temporarily recede. In late October, a handful of male police officers stood immersed in conversation among themselves on the Broadway side of the park’s eastern barricade. Perhaps ten feet away stood a young white woman with a cardboard sign reading, “Clap twice if you’re in debt.” Upon registering her presence, a tall white officer, breaking the fourth wall of the barricade, shouted “Oh!” and clapped his hands twice, smiling. His fellow officers paused their conversation, looking at him in confusion. “It says clap if you’re in debt,” the cop explained to his fellow officers, matter-of-factly, “I’m in debt.” Smiles broke out as the officers began to realize the “joke”—that they shared more in common with those across the barricade than with those had who ordered the streets barricaded. “I’m in debt too!” one chimed in. Another said, with a sense of light-hearted finality, “Everyone’s in debt.”