On this day in New York · September 17, 2011
Occupy Wall Street Moves Into Zuccotti Park
A few hundred people with no permit and no leader walked into a privately owned plaza in the Financial District and stayed for fifty-nine days, long enough to change how the country argued about money.
The facts
- Date
- September 17, 2011
- Location
- Zuccotti Park, Financial District, Manhattan
- Called by
- Adbusters magazine
- Duration
- 59 days, ending when police cleared the park before dawn on November 15, 2011
On September 17, 2011, protesters answering a call from the Canadian magazine Adbusters marched into the Financial District looking for a place to camp. Police had already fenced off their first two picks, Chase Manhattan Plaza and Bowling Green Park, but Zuccotti Park was privately owned rather than city land, so officers had no legal way to clear anyone unless the owner asked. That legal quirk is the whole reason the occupation happened where it did. The camp ran nightly meetings, a kitchen, and a library under a slogan borrowed from a summer flyer, "We are the 99 percent," until police in riot gear cleared it before dawn on November 15.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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Since the park was private property, police could not legally force protesters to leave without being requested to do so by the property owner.
Wikipedia, explaining why Zuccotti Park stayed open to the occupation
Source: Wikipedia -
About an hour later, police in riot gear began removing protesters from the park, arresting some 200 people in the process, including a number of journalists.
Wikipedia, on the November 15, 2011 clearing of Zuccotti Park
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The 99 percent framing that came out of this one downtown block reset how Americans talked about inequality for a decade, and it happened only because a private plaza sat where a public one would have gotten everyone arrested on day one.
Sources
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