"The First Amendment Steps Are Over There:" With a Heavy Police Presence, Occupy's Second Birthday
"The First Amendment Steps Are Over There:" With a Heavy Police Presence, Occupy's Second Birthday Begins
By Anna Merlan
Occupy Wall Street's terrible twos began this morning with a familiar set of scenes: protesters holding signs. Protesters glaring at cops. Cops glaring at protesters. Dozens of metal barricades lining the streets between them. Everyone pausing to look in unison at the Hipster Cop and his improbably tight pants. After a rowdy first anniversary last year that began on the wrong foot with some two dozen arrests, this morning's march looked downright serene by comparison. The only real moment of tension came on the steps of Wall Street's National Federal Hall Memorial, when the police and park rangers decided together, in a seemingly impromptu sort of way, that only one side of the monument's broad stone steps could be used for free speech purposes.
Many of the protesters started their morning demonstrating in front of a McDonald's near Zuccotti Park. Signs shaped to look like speech bubbles spelled out their grievances, against the chain and more generally: income disparity, racism, ecological responsibility (that one is probably more of a goal). There were about 75 people demonstrating to start, watched by at least 30 stone-faced officers clustered around the McDonald's door. As the crowd started to grow and march down past Zuccotti Park, the police presence grew too: motorcycle cops, officers on horseback, white shirts -- who always seem eager to hang out with Occupy -- blue-jacketed community affairs officers, and, back in Zuccotti a little later, the least-subtle undercover officers in the universe, out of uniform and dressed down, but wandering over periodically to chat with the men and women in blue. Most uniformed officers had thick bunches of zip-ties, used for handcuffs in larger crowds, hanging at their belts.
As the crowd headed down Wall Street, a traveling jazz band started to play an uptempo version of "When the Saints Go Marching In." A few puppets by street theater group Money Warz joined the march: Nosferatu with dollar signs in his eyes, and a giant roll of toilet paper to symbolize the Trans-Pacific Partnership. A tiny woman with grey hair in a long tan trench coat raised her fist and kept it there. People squeezed by the other way in droves to head to work, some of them more sympathetic to the revolution than others.
Read more at http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/09/the_first_amend.php