Thank You, Anarchy. Nathan Schneider
work. There were TV news trucks on the north edge of the park. A groggy woman near me cried, “Look at the news, guys!”
After overnighters groggily packed up their bedding and lined up for dumpster-dived bagels, an unplanned-for 7 a.m. General Assembly session began. Its purpose was a rundown of the day’s events. Committees that met the night before had decided to have marches to Wall Street at 9:00, 11:30, and 3:30. But then somebody came to the front of the assembly and announced through the people’s mic that he was going to march right then. Wall Street bankers were walking to work, and we were just sitting there. The commuters would already be at their desks by nine. He ran off and, promptly, more than a hundred others followed. They marched around the plaza first, chant wasing, “All Day! All Week! Occupy Wall Street!” and then set off heading south on Broadway. The occupation was starting the workweek early.
Upon arriving at Wall Street, the marchers found that the blocks around the New York Stock Exchange, which had been barricaded completely throughout the weekend, now had open sidewalks. After briefly massing at Wall and Broadway, they proceeded down the sidewalk on Wall Street, chanting and banging on the barricades that were still blocking off the street, making a mighty noise. They flooded the commuters trying to get to work in that area and clogged the way—which was the point. “We! Are! The 99 percent!” they chanted. To the large detachment of police alongside them, they’d sometimes replace “We” with “You.”
For almost two hours the march went on, continually evading attempts by police to pin it into an enclosed space or guide it out of the area. When the barricades on Broad Street were opened in order to let the marchers out (and keep them out), they used hand signals to turn around and head back up toward Wall Street. The march morphed into a long, two-directional picket line along Wall Street itself, going back and forth and back and forth as the Stock Exchange’s opening bell rang. “Ring! The! Bell!” they cried. With so many Occupiers out in the streets, scouts went back to make sure that there were still enough people in Liberty Square to hold it.
Most bystanders and commuters in the midst of the march weren’t amused. (The goal wasn’t to amuse them.) “Shit” was something I heard a lot. A bitter dog walker said to a security guard, “They say it’s their street”—the chant was “Whose street? Our street!”—“but they don’t even pay taxes.” Along those lines, also, I heard the soon-to-be-ubiquitous “Get a job!” And then there was ambivalence: “I hope the police protect the financial . . . bullshit.”
A middle-aged woman from El Salvador with painted eyebrows and a coffee in her hand said, “We used to do this in my country in the ’70s and ’80s. They’d arrest all of us.” She was on her way to work but took pictures of the police officers in charge and made sure I did too, just to have them on record.
When the “Let’s! Go! Home!” chant finally came at around quarter after nine, the march returned victoriously to Liberty Square and took stock. There were four arrests over the course of it—for crimes such as stepping off the sidewalk and touching a barricade—followed by several more as the day went on. A meeting convened to talk about how to do it better next time. These people were not just there to march; they were there to occupy, to discuss, and to build a blessed community.
Over the course of the day, more and more reporters turned up. It was one thing to hang around a private park for the weekend, but it was another to stay into the workweek and disrupt the business of the Financial District with the intention of doing so for longer—all day, all week. The afternoon General Assembly meeting was full of new faces, and sign holders stood against a substantial line of police on the sidewalk along Broadway. People passing by snapped pictures of the vast spread of messages painted on cardboard that was becoming Zuccotti Park’s new floor.
In the rupture of the ordinary that characterized those early days, everything felt in some sense religious, charged with a secret extremity and transcendence—secret, because the rest of the world hadn’t yet become aware of what was happening down at Liberty Square. Whenever I came back to Liberty after some time away, there was a feeling of entering sacred ground. Yet the moment I arrived, I was suddenly in a whirl of frantic conversations about worldly things: squabbles, crises, food mishaps, small victories, marches, and so on. All those things were sacred too. Once enmeshed in this kind of talk, you couldn’t escape the plaza if you tried, because someone else, and then someone else, would come up to you with some other fantastic question or need. It was a place especially conducive to those of us with obsessive tendencies, who like to be consumed in a given interest or project to the exclusion of all else. There, the god of ordinary life was dead, resurrected in the business of self-reliance.
Notwithstanding what Liberty Square would later devolve into, it had a Puritanical single-mindedness early on. One night, in the middle of a group cozying up to go to sleep, somebody slipped out a bottle of vodka. “What are you doing with that?” another whispered. Why bother with that when there’s this? Chain-smoked, hand-rolled cigarettes were ubiquitous, but at first that was it. Some would confess to me that they were desperate for a joint, it had been so long. They hadn’t been tending to their addictions.
I remember watching, one morning, a guy in glasses as he greeted the sunrise by putting out a small rug, alone, and beginning the morning salat, which Muslims pray five times daily. Just as he started, one of the food vendors on the plaza came out from his stand and interrupted him. He pointed eastward, correcting the Occupier’s guess as to the direction of Mecca.
On Tuesday the sun rose—behind clouds—on a tent city. Although police had made clear they wouldn’t tolerate any structures, the prospect of overnight rain made a group of Occupiers decide around midnight the night before to set up tarps over media and food supplies, as well as to erect some of the tents that had been donated by Lupe Fiasco to sleep in themselves. This would make for their roughest confrontation yet with those sworn to serve and protect them.
While few were yet awake, I got up out of the deluxe-sized tent where I slept with almost a dozen others and wandered around the plaza. I heard a motorcycle cop saying on his cell phone, “That’s my plan—to have them down as soon as possible.” On the north side of the park, where the morning before there had been three TV news trucks to serve as witnesses, there was now only an NYPD Communications Division Command Post truck. Inside I saw an officer with “COUNTERTERRORISM” on the back of his uniform.
At 6:58, a cop wearing a suit and tie began walking through the plaza, peering through the mesh into tents where Occupiers were sleeping, demanding, “The tents have to come down.”
Those who spent the night woke up and sprang into various sorts of action. Some immediately began complying by pulling out tent poles—“for the good of the movement”—while others insisted that they should stop. Still more suggested a middle path: to hold up the tents and tarps by hand, rather than with poles. An ad hoc meeting started in the center of the plaza to discuss the matter, but in the course of it nearly all the tents and tarps were taken down by self-appointed volunteers. A lot of people were frantic. A lot of people were terrified.
The scattered arguments and confusion coalesced at the plaza’s northern wall, where General Assembly meetings were being held. At around 7:20, Justin Wedes—a twenty-five-year-old, Twitter-savvy schoolteacher with close-cropped hair and thick black glasses—takes hold of the megaphone to speak. His words are echoed fervently but unnecessarily by the people’s mic, and like many others he has nearly lost his voice from all the chanting.
“We derive strength from each other,” he says, as the soon-to-be-notorious Captain Edward Winski walks up to him, followed by a posse of officers. Winski whispers something in Justin’s ear, presumably an order to put down the megaphone. But Justin continues: “More important than that, though”—until Winski grabs him, throws him to the ground, folds his arms expertly around his back, and takes him away.
“Shame! Shame!” shout Occupiers, and, “The whole world is watching!” That was the last time I saw any of them with a megaphone on Liberty Square.
Ten minutes later, the police were back. A group of them approached an Occupier near the rear of the meeting. As he was accosted and cuffed, officers shoved others aside, who started chanting the NYPD’s motto, “Courtesy,