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No Place to Truly Occupy

The occupation of Wall Street isn’t permanent but it can feel that way. Finding no place quite suitable to their needs, no Trafalgar, Tiananmen, or Tahir Square for New York, the protesters have ingeniously invented their own great public square. They...

The occupation of Wall Street isn’t permanent but it can feel that way. Finding no place quite suitable to their needs, no Trafalgar, Tiananmen, or Tahir Square for New York, the protesters have ingeniously invented their own great public square. They have created one, and then many.

I’ve become slightly obsessed with Occupy Wall Street and the way I see it urbanizing in real time. When I first visited a few weeks ago, I felt the frantic urge to participate, but I was afraid to let it out, afraid to risk my liberty, and basically afraid of getting arrested. I followed the throngs to the end of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was the day hundreds were penned in the middle of the bridge, and carted off in buses commandeered by the police for use as paddywaggons. I watched and then I left, wondering about the urban implications of #OWS. What did the occupation have to do with this city in particular, with monumental public infrastructure like this? And what would the city and its spaces do to its new occupiers?

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I posted my questions on the Facebook page of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, the wandering urban think tank that spent the summer in New York. They expressed an interest, and soon they announced a public tour. I had class that Wednesday afternoon so I missed it, but the thought of an anthropological dissection of Zucotti Park sponsored by an august museum and a major car company tickled me. I imagined the 1% in the guise of the 99%, stalking the drum circles and book shelves and laundry piles for clues to this particular brand of urbanism, for something to throw theories at, because any one of them were bound to stick.

Zuccotti Park, halfway between Wall Street and Ground Zero, is the homeland, the Oz, and the fabricated Utopia. But like any good empire, they’ve expanded. Provinces include Washington Square Park, Times Square, Columbus Square, and Thompson Square Park. These iconic New York spaces have all played host to temporary occupations. To see a General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street being held in the empty fountain in Washington Square Park is incredible. March from Zuccotti Park, stay at Washington Square Park, skip up to 96th street, parade down to Columbus Square in a giant scrum led improbably by Pete Seeger, peacefully occupy, then return on foot only when you’re forcibly ejected. The occupations aren’t permanent but their presence, their immanence, is in the air city-wide.

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By itself, Zuccotti Park is a rather unappealing spit of paved earth, tucked between tall office buildings on a number of sides, and the World Trade Center site just to the northwest. It is a “bonus plaza,” a 33,000-square-foot privately owned public space, built in 1969 by US Steel in exchange for 500,000 square feet of additional height at its adjacent corporate headquarters. Now owned by Brookfield Properties, a real estate behemoth, the park’s been “designed up” a little, given trees and a few pieces of random modernist art, and, up until recently, largely invisible to most New Yorkers. According to a friend who used to work nearby at the September 11 Memorial Museum, Zuccotti’s reputation was minor and ignominious: it was the “break-up” plaza, given its tendency to serve as a convenient site for lunchtime disentanglements.

An oddity of zoning, Zuccotti Park is legally required to be open to the public, but as a piece of private property, does not fall under typical police jurisdiction. To the occupiers, Zuccotti is Liberty Plaza, in part out of aspiration, in part because that was the park’s official name until 2006. That year, Brookfield renamed it after company chairman John Zuccotti, whose office is a few blocks away and many stories up. The occupation has drawn attention to the public-private quandary of spaces like this, which are common in New York.

The park could be compared to a city, but I think comparing it to a home – a very large, open plan modernist one – might be more accurate. They have a communal kitchen, health and hygiene station, an “info” hub that serves as a sort of command central to manage the groups many websites, a library, and a station for a volunteer security force. They have an art area, to preserve and display protest signage when not in use. They’ve made a simple masterplan, which was implemented by October 15th. And they take care of their park home, organizing park-wide cleaning days, and performing regular maintenance. The park’s two low flower beds have still not been trampled on.

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New York has a long history of public outrage but few good spaces for assembly or encampment. The architecture critic Michael Sorkin pointed this out in a 2004 piece for Architectural Record. “It’s time for Liberty Square,” he wrote, seeing an opportunity in the Ground Zero redevelopment plans to cultivate a more active public space there. This area, approximately three blocks of land surrounding the Santiago Calatrava-designed PATH Station, was to be filled in with low “filler” buildings that provided income enough to cover taxes, but which would effectively reserve the sites for taller development when the demand arose.

Here, Michael Sorkin thought, was exactly the spot for a great public plaza, bigger than Union Square, completely open, completely public, connected to the world, but with space to let a political revolution grow. At the end of his piece, he summarizes it into one solid paragraph:

“Surrounded by a strong edge of building, highly accessible, and located on a site of remarkable resonance, the space might become not simply a symbol but the scene of liberty in action, a zone of free assembly and free speech. It is also in the heart of things, at the center of our institutions of governance and commerce, an apt and visual site for public expression. And, instead of managing remembrance [of 9/11] through a series of themed activities that offer little opportunity for spontaneity or collectivity, it would truly belong to the people, an embodiment of our nation’s greatest ethical and political power.”

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They may have claimed the plaza for themselves now, but Occupy Wall Street’s solution is an inherently temporary one, and the visibility of the occupation — and its un-ending drum circles — is likely hastening the end. Laws will change, clearer power structures will emerge, and broader enforcement will curtail the power of protesters to use these not-so-public places. As for new Liberty Plazas, few possibilities are emerging. Office buildings are rising quickly on the site of Sorkin’s democratic thought experiment. The footprints of the old World Trade Center towers sit in a memorial park, thick with an aura of sanctity and demands on dignity, as Sorkin puts it, that wouldn’t be fitting for protest.

The members of the occupation themselves have not yet found a contingency plan, or a backup site. There is talk of a need for an indoor place, if the occupation extends through the winter, but nothing has emerged. Brookfield may have lost at its attempts to expel the occupation, but any other owner of public space in New York will be prepared ahead of time to fend off the invasion, or make sure another occupation never starts.

Sorkin’s plea for a new public space stands. When the freedom of Zuccotti Park is compromised, when Occupy Wall Street ends, no one space now in New York, or being planned, will be able to match it. The current site of occupation will have only existed for a fleeting moment, under an optimistic interpretation of real estate law, under the eye of the media and the police, and with the sympathies of its owner. It will have only been a mirror, a brief glimmer of what a city like New York really needs: a vibrant, accessible, comfortable public space.

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“Insubordinate assembly is a crucial element both of democratic discourse and of the character, location, and political valence of the space that’s crucial to such expression,” Sorkin wrote in 2004. “Speech demands its audience and its places of transmission and reception.” For now Zucotti Park is proving that point in more vibrant ways than any Facebook page or Tweet stream could ever do. Among the many lessons and ideas Occupy offers, how will we remember its most basic and most physical one?

@SeanMcCaughan

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