HALLOWEEN HAPPENINGS, p. 21
Volume 81, Number 17 $1.00
West and East Village, Chelsea, Soho, Noho, Hudson Square, Little Italy, Chinatown and Lower East Side, Since 1933
With nets, spray and force, police crack down on march BY JEFFERSON SIEGEL Police and marchers from the Occupy Wall Street movement clashed last Saturday in and around Union Square. More than 80 people were arrested, including passersby and members of the press. All spent the night in jail, many having been swept up in police netting on E. 12th St. The Occupy Wall Street encampment is based in Zuccotti Park, also referred to as Liberty Park, near the World Trade Center site. The previous week the protesters had marched several times near Wall St. With the encampment in its eighth day, the participants turned their sights northward. Hundreds wended their way through Tribeca and the Village as they headed toward Union Square, historically a destination for protests and public speaking. As in their previous marches, the demonstrators were peaceful, more concerned with disseminating their message than with exhibiting defiance. Chanting, “Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!” they approached Union Square around 2 p.m. After a brief pause, the crowd started to return Downtown. They began spilling off the sidewalks when police suddenly moved in. Rheannone Ball, 19 from Brooklyn, was in the street when a police commander threw his arm around her neck. Several of the marchers tried grabbing her arms to pull her away and a brief tug of war ensued. Moments later Ball was thrown to the ground and police piled onto her. “His arm is around my throat. I was panicking,” she recounted the next day. “I was screaming my name so that someone knows I’m getting arrested.” The situation quickly escalated as police began unfurling orange netting, attempting to encircle the crowd, first along the triangular-shaped park east of the square, then along 14th St. With their progress blocked, marchers found themselves being diverted back toward University Place. Police started grabbing more people. A man was lying face down in handcuffs in the middle of 14th St. and University Place
September 29 - October 5, 2011
C.B. 2 angered after N.Y.U. goes to the media first BY ALBERT AMATEAU New York University’s proposal that the city Parks Department take over two city-owned green strips on the east and west sides of the university’s northern superblock provoked conflicting responses from elected officials and Village civic associations. The university announced at a Sept. 15 news conference that it would modify its original proposal to acquire the strips along Mercer St. and LaGuardia
Place between W. Third and Bleecker Sts. and support a Parks Department takeover from the city Department of Transportation. But the university wants easements that would allow access across the strips and permit construction beneath them in conjunction with the long-term NYU 2031 redevelopment plan for its two superblocks. Critics focused on two main issues: the easements
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State health agency, board hear debate on St. Vincent’s site
Photo by Jefferson Siegel
An Occupy Wall Street marcher is taken down to the ground by police and cuffed near Union Square on Saturday.
as shoppers stepped around him. With a large orange net unfurled, police began sprinting down University Place. In the resulting chaos, some marchers were forced onto the sidewalk while others were grabbed in the middle of the street and cuffed. At 12th St. people found themselves blocked in all directions by lines
BY ALBERT AMATEAU It was all about St. Vincent’s from morning till night last Thursday. At 10 a.m. on Sept. 22, the state Health Planning Council heard testimony on the conversion of St. Vincent’s O’Toole Pavilion on the west side of Seventh Ave. into a comprehensive community health center with a free-standing emergency department to be operated by North ShoreLong Island Jewish Health
of police and netting. A police commander grabbed a man from the crowd and, violently twisting his arm, forced him to the pavement, where several other officers pounced on him. As more struggles broke out, many found their only escape by walking west on 12th St.
System. Later that day, at the 6 p.m. Community Board 2 meeting, opponents and supporters debated the Rudin Organization’s proposed redevelopment of the former hospital’s east campus into a 450-unit condo residential complex. In a joint statement to the Health Planning Council, local elected officials said that while they were con-
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EDITORIAL, LETTERS PAGE 12
MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU PAGE 18
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