By Henry Goldman - Oct 14, 2011 4:48 AM GMT+0700
Wall Street protesters won’t be allowed to return gear such as sleeping bags to Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan after the privately owned space is closed for cleaning beginning tomorrow, New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
“People will have to remove all their belongings and leave the park,” Kelly said today after a memorial ceremony in Battery Park. “After it’s cleaned, they’ll be able to come back. But they won’t be able to bring back the gear. The sleeping bags, that sort of thing, will not be able to be brought back into the park.”
The Occupy Wall Street protest that began in New York on Sept. 17 has spread to cities including Denver, Boston and San Francisco. More than 700 have been arrested in New York demonstrations, mostly on disorderly conduct charges, and about 140 were arrested this week in Boston. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said he supports the protesters’ free-speech rights as long as they don’t violate the law.
Brookfield Office Properties Inc., a New York-based real estate developer that owns the park at the intersection of Broadway and Liberty Street near the World Trade Center site, agreed to create it as a public amenity open 24 hours a day year-round. It also established rules against camping, lying on benches, and using tarps and tents.
‘Defend the Occupation’
The demonstrators view the cleaning and the prohibition on gear in the park as an “attempt to shut down Occupy Wall Street for good,” Patrick Bruner, a spokesman for the group, said in a statement. He called on people to come to the site at 6 a.m. tomorrow, an hour before cleaning is scheduled to begin, “to defend the occupation from eviction.”
“Occupy Wall Street is committed to keeping the park clean and safe,” Bruner said in the e-mail. “We are organizing major cleaning operations today and will do so regularly.”
The demonstrators had set up a sanitation committee that is already sweeping and scrubbing the park, Bruner said. He offered to provide volunteers to help Brookfield maintain standards of cleanliness at the site.
Protesters have been camping there since the demonstration began last month. The park has become a sea of backpacks, blue tarps and sleeping bags, which the occupants roll up and stack in piles during daylight.
‘Unsanitary Conditions’
“Brookfield respects the rights of free speech, assembly and peaceful protest,” Melissa Coley, a company spokeswoman, said in a statement today. “The manner in which Zuccotti Park has been used for the past several weeks has created unsanitary conditions.”
Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne, Kelly’s chief spokesman, said a disorderly conduct charge may arise when a person blocks traffic on a sidewalk or roadway. In cases where an individual violates rules on private property, an owner may contact police to enforce rights against trespassing, Browne said. He said he had “every expectation” that demonstrators would comply with the law.
To use the clean-up as a pretext for mass arrests “would be a violation of the spirit of the First Amendment,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, in an e-mailed statement. The organization intends to monitor the site with observers tomorrow, she said.
“If the city is drawing a line in the sand over cleaning the park and refuses to accept the reasonable offers by protesters to do a clean-up, then the recent statements by the mayor and police commissioner about protecting the right to protest were disingenuous,” she said.
Call for Meeting
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer called on the mayor to meet immediately with residents of Lower Manhattan and demonstrators at the park to “avoid major conflict and protect the safety and well-being of all involved.”
The 7 a.m. clean-up deadline imposed by Brookfield should be extended to give city officials, residents, protesters and the property owner an opportunity to meet, he said. “The protesters will be able to continue to exercise their First Amendment rights in Zuccotti Park, or anywhere else in New York City,” said Marc LaVorgna, a mayoral spokesman. “But those rights do not include the ability to infringe on the rights of others, which is why the rules governing the park will be enforced.”
Posted Notices
Yesterday, Brookfield executives announced their intention to clean the park, and city officials told demonstrators they would have to leave temporarily to allow the clearing of debris and cleaning of park surfaces. Brookield posted notices around the park telling demonstrators that camping, erection of tents, use of tarps, sleeping bags and lying on the ground are against the rules.
Last night, Bloomberg visited the park and Deputy Mayor Caswell Holloway issued a statement telling the demonstrators, “the cleaning will be done in stages and the protesters will be able to return to the areas that have been cleaned, provided they abide by the rules.”
The mayor is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.
To contact the reporter on this story: Henry Goldman in New York at hgoldman@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Tannenbaum at mtannen@bloomberg.net
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