All Things in Moderation

I found myself in lower Manhattan yesterday with some time to kill before my timed pass for the newly opened 9/11 Memorial, so I wandered through Zuccotti Park, former ground zero of the Occupy Wall Street encampment.

Zuccotti Park is typical of several New York City semi-public spaces in that it is not a park in the conventional sense as there are no green spaces. It is a tiered totally hardscaped sliver of a city block with a wide assortment of benches and tables presumably for the enjoyment of nearby office workers on breaks.

Since the police evicted the occupiers/protesters/squatters in the dead of the night, the park has been ringed with two sets of portable crowd control barricades. The inner ring which is double thick in places encircles the park itself except for two difficult to discern cattle gate style entrances inconveniently located so as to make using the park as a short cut between Church Street and Broadway useless despite the crowded holiday pedestrian traffic around the park. The outer ring was another set of barricades at the curb-street line allowing for street crossing at corners but otherwise restricting access for jaywalkers.

Indeed, the park was deserted except for the occasional determined pedestrian and two people huddled at the stone tables, one looking none too warm and definitely on the unhoused end of the homeless-hipster continuum and the other awaiting to hustle chess opponents who never seemed to arrive.

The only two protesters to be seen were at the far east end of the park. One had an incoherent cardboard sign about livestreaming the protest. The other was the ‘official’ OWS representative who was collecting donations while clutching a cup of coffee for warmth. I chatted with him for just a few minutes while he explained how the cops were doing their best to make the park look inaccessible while nominally maintaining it open.

At any given time there were more than a dozen policemen circulating in and around the park, frequently congregating in small groups to chat and joke. There was no serious crowd control going on except for maintaining a highly visible presence.

The OWS protesters are in search of another base of operation, most recently on property owned by nearby Trinity Church who has rebuffed them. I can see why they have to because nobody is going to be occupying Zuccotti Park any time soon.

More photos here.

Filed under: Uncategorized |