Jared MalsinThe Horse Auction Mart isn’t the only local building garnering recognition from historians – a storefront on East First Street that once housed “the most famous radical center in New York,” according to Emma Goldman, will be in the spotlight later this month.
On May 30, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation will present a plaque commemorating the history of 50 East First Street, between First and Second Avenues. As The Local has reported, the ground-floor space – which recently got Fantom, a photography magazine, as a tenant – once housed Justus Schwab’s Saloon. The drinks den was an “important meeting place for like-minded radicals of the day, including anarchist Emma Goldman and writer Ambrose Bierce, many of whom used the saloon as their mailing address,” according to a letter from the G.V.S.H.P.
An invite to the 6 p.m. ceremony indicates that Two Boots will provide refreshments and entertainment, and “Emma Goldman” herself will make an appearance.
Tim Schreier Protester arrested at Sara D. Roosevelt ParkWhen we filed our final report on May Day activities in the wee hours of this morning, the police would say only that more than 30 were arrested during yesterday’s demonstrations. The final tally is now in: City Room reports that 34 people were taken into custody and another 52 issued desk appearance tickets.
The photo above is one of Tim Schreier’s newly posted shots from the Wildcat March at Sara D. Roosevelt Park. And arrest videos have also emerged on YouTube. A video posted by Kg4 shows a protester kicking out a police car window from inside of a cruiser. Read more…
Photos of the march across the Williamsburg Bridge, Sara D. Roosevelt Park, and the Wildcat March by Jared Malsin.
As documented on The Local’s liveblog, demonstrations and arrests took place across the city today as anarchists, union members, Occupy Wall Street supporters, employees of The Strand, residents of public housing in Alphabet City, and even banjo players used May Day as an occasion to protest the status quo.
The proceedings were for the most part orderly, but scuffles broke out when approximately 200 demonstrators, many dressed in black and some covering their faces, assembled in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, at Second Avenue and Houston Street, at 1 p.m. for a pre-planned, unpermitted “Wildcat March.” Read more…
John PenleyBefore today’s May Day festivities kick off, let’s turn the clock back 22 years, to May 1, 1990. That’s when an affordable-housing festival in Tompkins Square Park ended in a riot in which 28 police officers were injured and 29 people – some of them activists, anarchists, and squatters who had participated in the better known riots two years earlier – were arrested.
In this account reprinted from Clayton Patterson’s book, “Resistance: A Radical Social and Political History of the Lower East Side,” Ellen Moynihan, a writer and photographer who lately has been documenting Occupy Wall Street, describes how the melee began, and offers historical context going back to the 1800s, when May 1 was the time when many Lower East Side tenement dwellers’ leases would expire, causing mass migration. Read more…
Suzanne RozdebaMay Day is almost upon us, and with it will come a citywide carnival of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.
But what will May Day actually look like in New York City and in the East Village? Will we see orderly marchers proceeding peacefully between police barricades? Or will Wall Street burn, as the graffiti on Avenue A warns? Or should we expect, as Jerry Rubin predicted for the 1972 Democratic National Convention, “ten thousand naked hippies” marching on Wall Street?
Asked to predict the size of the demonstrations, Occupy organizer Marisa Holmes, 25, told The Local that May 1 will be on par with the movement’s fall protests or larger. “It won’t be a general strike but it will be substantial,” said the freelance film editor and graduate student at Hunter College. Read more…
Jared Malsin Author Wayne Price, left, makes a comment.Three days after alleged anarchist protesters ran amok in the East Village, an anarchist meeting on Sixth Street was disrupted by a verbal altercation between an organizer of the event and a man he later accused of being a police spy.
Nine people were in attendance at Tuesday’s Anarchist Forum at the Sixth Street Community Center. The meeting featured coffee in paper cups, vegan cucumber sandwiches, and a polite discussion of how health care services might be organized in a future anarchist society.
The forum is a social event that has taken place once a month since November, according to organizers Evan Courtney, 36, who works in an import-export business, and Walter Williams, 60, a retired software developer residing in Washington Heights.
The tension occurred during its second hour when Mr. Courtney confronted an attendee named Leo, who had arrived over an hour late. Read more…
Jared MalsinLocal anarchists are planning to hold an “Open Forum” at the Sixth Street Community Center Tuesday night, just days after alleged anarchist demonstrators broke a window at a 7-Eleven on St. Marks Place.
According to a flyer spotted by The Local on Avenue A last week, the New York Anarchist Forum is “a gathering where we meet other anarchists and discuss anarchist ideas, events projects and whatever else comes up.” Past notices for the forum indicate the meeting is a monthly event.
Police arrested three people after Saturday night’s violence, in which demonstrators also attempted to break windows at the Astor Place Starbucks using metal pipes. At least one of those arrests took place outside the Sixth Street Community Center, where an after party for the NYC Anarchist Book Fair was taking place. Two police officers suffered minor injuries while scuffling with protesters.
Yesterday, the owner of the 7-Eleven that’s due to open on St. Marks Place tomorrow jokingly offered Saturday’s vandals a “peace treaty Slurpee.”
Stephen Rex Brown Norman Jemal, the owner of the soon-to-open 7-Eleven on St. Marks Place, is ready to bury the hatchet with whoever smashed the window of his store.The soda machine is already operating, the fridge is getting stocked with Gatorade, and the 14 coffee dispensers are in place. The new 7-Eleven on St. Marks Place is set to open on Wednesday with a new window pane on its storefront, following vandalism during Saturday night’s anarchist-fueled mayhem.
Stephen Rex Brown The cracked window.“People have the right to express themselves, hopefully non-violently and without property damage,” said the owner of the convenience store, Norman Jemal. “Everyone has the right to their own opinion — though I’m not exactly sure what their opinion is.”
Mr. Jemal had heard rumors about the rowdy goings-on at Astor Place and off of Washington Square Park that likely led to his window getting cracked, but said he was unaware of the details. After hearing about the attack on Starbucks, he sought to distance himself from other corporate businesses. “This is not a standard powerhouse chain store. They’re all franchised to people like me,” he said, adding that the replacement window is “not cheap.” Read more…
The police closed down Tompkins Square Park tonight after a window of a 7-Eleven was smashed, seemingly by protesters.
Around 9:20 p.m., Tim Pool, a livecaster of Occupy Wall Street events, filmed police cars blocking off Tompkins Square Park. In the video embedded above, Mr. Pool reports hearing that, after the Anarchist Book Fair earlier today, a “black bloc” formed and “there was a lot of property destruction, a few windows broken. We heard a few people tried to smash some Starbucks windows and ‘some Mafioso-looking guys came out with big poles and started swinging them.’” Read more…
