An Occupation is Born
“People from past General Assemblies didn’t come [to Zuccotti Park] with sleeping bags—they didn’t expect to stay the night.”
—Marina Sitrin, member of OWS’ Facilitators Working Group
Matt Presto, a teacher and graduate student who had participated in many of the planning meetings of the New York General Assembly in Tompkins Square Park, came home to his apartment on Friday night from a training where a small group of mostly young, mostly white men and women made last minute plans for Saturday, September 17. Anticipating possible arrest, he had emailed a co-worker, “Just so you know, I might not be at work on Monday.” He stayed up late that night talking with six friends from Ohio who had come into New York for the Occupy Wall Street event. They discussed the likely behavior of the New York Police Department (NYPD): pepper spraying, kettling, baton beating, shoving people on the ground. They improvised first aid kits with bandages, gauze, and a solution of water and antacid for eyewash.
The NYPD was also preparing. Police Department chief spokesman Paul J. Browne told the New York Times, “No permits had been sought for the demonstration but plans for it were well known publicly.” (Organizers suspected that their planning meetings had been infiltrated by police informants.) Saturday morning the city shut down sections of Wall Street near the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall. By 10:00 a.m. metal barricades manned by police officers ringed the blocks of Wall Street between Broadway and Williams Street.
Around noon Matt Presto arrived in Bowling Green Park, home to the famous statue of the Charging Bull. He found 400 or so people, “circling around the bull, chanting, signs and everything.” At noon, a group sat down and leaned against the metal barricade blocking access to Wall Street, forming what OWS “First Communique” called a “spontaneous blockade.” The police threatened to arrest the people sitting down, so they got up and marched away. By 2:00 p.m., nearly two dozen uniformed police officers surrounded the bull, while, as the New York Times delicately put it, “others worked to disperse the crowd.” Meanwhile, various participants held impromptu yoga and tai chi classes in Bowling Green Park.
At 3 p.m. a crowd of about 1,000 began gathering, according to plan, at Chase Plaza. Reverend Billy Talen of the Church of Stop Shopping and Rosanne Barr gave addresses through a bullhorn. Trays of sliced bread and jars of Skippy peanut butter were passed around. Fruit was distributed from shopping carts.
The Tactical Committee had produced a map on which they had marked seven possible locations for a General Assembly to take place. At 2:30, several hundred photocopies of this map were handed out at Chase Plaza, along with the instruction to go to “Location Two”—Zuccotti Park—“in thirty minutes.”
Bordered on the west by Trinity Place, on the east by Broadway, and with Liberty and Cedar Streets to its north and south, respectively, Zuccotti Park (widely known in the movement by its original, pre-2006 name of Liberty Square or Liberty Plaza) is nestled in the heart of Lower Manhattan—directly in between Wall Street and the former World Trade Center site. The neighborhood is filled with tourists, as well as a mix of financial workers, retail service workers and hard-hatted laborers from the nearby Freedom Tower construction site. Although Zuccotti is privately-owned, the corporate owner has made the park public for zoning benefits and the location is no stranger to un-permitted political protest. (In the early summer of 2010, an anti-mosque rally was held there in which some 300 right-wing protesters defied a rejected permit request and filled the park’s western side with anti-Muslim signs as well as American and Gadsden flags for the better part of an afternoon.)
The crowd marched across the financial district chanting “Wall Street is our street” and “Power to the people not to the banks.” At Zuccotti Park a food committee passed out sandwiches and water while people sang, danced, and watched puppets.
Although a General Assembly had been announced for 3:00 p.m., “It was decided we would go into small breakout groups to have discussions about what people wanted to see come out of this and why they were interested in Occupy Wall Street,” Matt Presto recalled. “We spent a lot of time trying to explain the process, because this was new for a lot of people.”
According to Marina Sitrin, a member of OWS’s Facilitators Working Group, who teaches at the City University of New York, the original idea was to have “political discussion about why you are frustrated” with the state of the world and “what inspires you, what would you like to see in the world?” Talk soon turned to plans for the occupation itself. “What people came to Zuccotti Park prepared to talk about, was how they were going to occupy, what it was going to look like, and what tomorrow looks like.” Participants “wanted to get down to the question: So, are we going to occupy, or are we not going to occupy?”
Many of those who had participated in the previous New York General Assembly meetings in Tompkins Square Park were doubtful that OWS had a future. Marina noted that “People from past General Assemblies didn’t come with sleeping bags—they didn’t expect to stay the night.” Her fellow facilitator, Marisa Holmes, recalls, “I along with many others, expected that it would fizzle out in a couple of days.”
As the time for the General Assembly approached, a group of 40 or 50 gathered to figure out how to run it. Finally, Marina, Marisa, and a few others who had been in the Tompkins Square General Assemblies agreed to facilitate it. Marina recalls,
It was beautiful and powerful. We started with megaphones, and it didn’t work very well. We were standing in the center up on one of the benches and everyone was standing around in a mass circle, so we had to speak in two directions. After ten or fifteen minutes we put the megaphones down and I spoke to the people in front of me using the people’s mic, which is something that we had practiced in facilitator training two nights previously. I had participated in it and seen it used in Seattle in the 1999 WTO protests, but I had thought of it as something useful on the street for communicating information. I actually hadn’t thought of it as a way of conducting an assembly. But we were standing in the center of a group of two thousand people and megaphones were not working.
She spoke a few words to the people closest by, then asked them to repeat it in unison to the others.
“That first night using the people’s mic, people hadn’t done it before, but immediately picked up on it. It creates an atmosphere of active listening and participation. As soon as we started the people’s mic, the vibe and energy totally changed.”
The General Assembly decided that the group would occupy Zuccotti Park overnight and hold a General Assembly at 10:00 a.m. the next morning. About 300 people settled down in sleeping bags for the night while the police waited nearby. Matt Presto remembers “feeling pleasantly surprised” but “still on edge about what would happen next,” and thinking, “How long could the police tolerate this? They’ll probably break us up Sunday evening or Monday.”
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Alexandre de Carvalho, a 28-year-old from Rio de Janiero who had been part of the Arts and Culture committee since the planning of the occupation, described his first night in the park. “It was cold and it hurt,” he said. Tents weren’t allowed, and most occupiers had only thin sleeping bags and cardboard boxes between them and the pavement.
Alex woke up around six in the morning, after only two hours of real sleep, uncertain of what the first full day of occupation would become. “We still hadn’t figured out what to do,” he said.
Amy Roberts, now a co-founder of the OWS archive, picked up on that uncertainty when she visited the occupation in its first days. “I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It was just completely different from anything I’d seen before,” she said, confessing she thought the occupiers “naïve” at first. “I had been active in so many things for so many years without seeing them go anywhere that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get involved. But I kept coming back.” Early discussions among the occupiers were, she says, mainly concerned with “how to relate to the police, and then how to just organize the discussions.”
On the first full day of occupation, police asked occupiers to remove signs taped to park trees Sunday morning, and the question of whether or not to obey absorbed the 10 a.m. General Assembly. At around noon a group, tired of talk, broke off from the GA and began to march around the square, chanting and urging others to join. Soon a large crowd danced down Broadway towards Battery Park in the September sun, beckoning to tourists and chanting, “It’s more fun than shopping!”
The facilitators were good-natured about being interrupted; when the marchers returned they met them with applause and announced that the General Assembly would reconvene at 3 p.m. But the episode raised doubts about whether or not the group’s energy could be channeled effectively into the consensus process.
These doubts were put to rest when the assembly reconvened at 3 p.m. This time, the assembly did not disperse until 10:30 p.m. and it managed to reach some important decisions about how occupiers would relate to the police and to each other: There would be no official police liaison; the tactics working group would be empowered to scout out alternative locations if they were forced from Zuccotti.
Even as the occupation was figuring out how to define itself, it was already inspiring support from people around the country and the world. Justin Wedes, a member of the Food working group, explained that after 24 hours, occupiers had grown tired of fruit and PB&J. His group cast about online for local Mom and Pop joints that could deliver warm food and were pleased to find one with a name that seemed “really in line with our mission”: Liberato’s Pizza. Wedes tweeted out calls for pizza orders and within hours the restaurant was “inundated with calls from around the world” by people ordering food for the protesters on their credit cards. Occupiers had to send a group to help pick up pizzas–the staff wasn’t large enough to keep up with the world’s desire to feed the burgeoning movement.
On Tuesday morning, it began to rain and occupiers moved to protect their belongings and media equipment with suspended tarps. According to the Web site occupywallst.org one of the main online forums of the movement, police moved in with bull horns at around 7 a.m., declaring the tarps illegal. Occupiers held an emergency General Assembly and decided to hold the tarps up themselves.
According to the NYPD, however, human-held tarps were still structures. Police began to rip tarps away from the occupiers. When one young man sat down on a tarp protecting media equipment, police threw him to the ground, face first, and then arrested him. Another video posted on the site showed police dragging a protester from the park to the sidewalk by his feet and denying an asthmatic arrestee an inhaler. In total, seven were arrested that day and the police walked off with arms full of confiscated blue tarps.
By Wednesday, despite the best efforts of the weather and the NYPD, Zuccotti Park had become a sort of makeshift village that would capture the popular imagination for the next three months. Information desks at the park’s entrances announced a daily schedule: daily marches on Wall Street timed with the opening and closing bells, general assemblies at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. There were medics on duty. The kitchen crew had set up their own workstation. Colorful cardboard signs decorated the pavement. And the drumming circle kept on drumming, rain or shine.
It was Wednesday’s General Assembly, Amy Roberts said, that convinced her to stick around. On Monday night, the assembly had broken up into small groups to draft Principles of Solidarity. Those principles had been combined and consolidated by a working group, and now the assembly was breaking into groups once again to further discuss and edit the draft. Listening to the brainstorm, Roberts said, “I was very impressed with how—just the idealism of everyone, you know, the optimism.”
The same working group then gathered everyone’s comments and edits into a second draft of Principles of Solidarity, presented to the General Assembly on Friday, September 23. After four blocks were presented and worked through, the GA moved again for consensus. The anonymous taker of the GA minutes that day recorded that “everyone was thrilled that consensus had been reached and the document would be posted online, in one of the most beautiful examples of a true democracy that I, personally, have ever seen.”
The Principles of Solidarity, the first official document produced by the occupation, were and are:
In addition to working out its defining principles that week, OWS was also starting to build solidarity with other causes and organizations. On the morning of Thursday, September 22, OWS activists disrupted a Sotheby’s art auction in support of lockedout art handlers unionized by Teamsters Local 814. Then, at around 7 p.m. the same night, a Union Square protest against Georgia death row prisoner Troy Davis’s execution started an impromptu march down to Zuccotti Park. Together, the marchers and the occupiers headed over to Wall Street. The popular, “Whose street? Our street!” changed to, “Whose street? Troy’s street!” as protesters showed the country’s financial capital that it would now join federal, state, and municipal buildings as a default receptor of public rage.
On Saturday, September 24, after a week of daily marches to Wall Street for the opening and closing bell, activists decided to march uptown. One of the marchers, Brennan Cavanaugh, was surprised and excited to find the crowd heading up Broadway, against traffic. “At that point I was like, this is the kind of march I can get behind—an unpermitted guerilla march. And people were just shouting, ‘All Day, All Week: Occupy Wall Street!’ The police didn’t know what to do, it seemed. They kept trying to block the streets from the people marching north but the people would just go around them.”
According to Cavanaugh, the march began to lose steam when it reached Union Square, and demonstrators were unsure of where to move next. That was when the police moved in, blocking 12th Street, University Place and Fifth Avenue with orange netting. The movement had appeared quiet, but the dynamic changed when Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna pepper sprayed a group of mostly women who were already contained within orange police netting. The video of the incident, in which a young woman suddenly drops to her knees with a scream and buries her face in her arms, immediately went viral on the Internet and was widely broadcast by mainstream media. Cavanaugh called it the “scream heard round the world.” The OWS message had been gaining traction all through the previous week. But the images of police violence on September 24 seemed to give the movement further momentum.
A total of 80 activists were arrested that day, including Cavanaugh. “I was photographing someone who had their face shoved to the ground and was being arrested and they rolled out the orange netting behind me. I heard the slap of plastic on the ground. And I went to step over it and as soon as I stepped over it, they lifted it up and I got caught in between it. A guy who I had never seen before, a plain-clothed man, came around and grabbed my wrist and put a zip tie on me.”
Cavanaugh sat in a cell with other protesters for three hours. He was released at 3 a.m. more fully committed to the movement than ever. “After that,” he says, “I was down with this whole thing.”