Who are the men and women seeking to occupy Union Square Park? Yesterday we met Fathema Shadida and Tim “Chyno” Chin. Today, meet two more of your new neighbors. 

Jared Malsin

Name: Karin Hofmann
Age: 69
Originally from: Germany. Emigrated to the Bronx at age 12.
Current residence: East 12th Street
Current job: Retired
Ideology: “Definitely a Liberal, and I say it proudly.” Read more…

Jared Malsin Fathema Shadida in Union Square Park

Since members of the Occupy Wall Street movement launched their attempted occupation of Union Square three weeks ago, the protesters have engaged in a nightly tug-o-war with police. The occupiers have responded to the nightly closure of Union Square Park and arrests with rap battles, sleep-ins and dangling donuts on strings.

But who are the men and women seeking to occupy the square? In hopes of learning more about our new neighbors (some of them old neighbors, actually), The Local spoke with 10 core activists, all of whom have spent at least one night sleeping on the edge of Union Square, and all of whom are dedicating their days to the new protest camp. Here are the vitals on two of them, with more to come every day this week.

Name: Fathema Shadida
Age: 57
Originally from: Sahara, Egypt
Current residence: Brooklyn
Job before joining occupy: New York City Parks Enforcement Patrol Officer Read more…

The Occupy Wall Street protesters that get the boot on a near-nightly basis from Union Square unveiled a new tactic early this morning: sleep-ins on the sidewalk. City Room reports that the Occupiers cited a ruling by a federal judge in 2000 that allowed people to stage sleep-ins on sidewalks as a form of organized protest. The group of more than two dozen laid out sleeping bags, blankets and cardboard in front of a Citibank and Bank of America in 40-degree weather.

A new site dedicated to the Occupy Wall Street movement aims to be a sounding board for protests around the world, and its launch party is next week at Arrow Bar on Avenue A. According to a write-up on Facebook, Occupy.com will “use media as a call for social, economic, environmental and political justice. We seek to inspire resistance, engagement and the creation of the new world we imagine.” The architects of the site add that they are “morally accountable to the movement as a whole.”

Daniel MaurerA woman protests the arrest of Mesiah
Hameed earlier in the day.

Multiple arrests – five of which were witnessed by The Local – occurred this afternoon during a march protesting police brutality organized by the Occupy Wall Street movement. The arrest of a teenager drew outrage when she was carried to a police van with her bra exposed.

Susan Howard, the New York City chapter coordinator for the National Lawyers Guild, said that an estimated 21 people were arrested during Occupy-related activities throughout the day, with “about a dozen” arrested during the march from Zuccotti Park to Union Square. The police were not yet able to confirm a number of arrests.

Videographer Paul Davis, who witnessed the arrest of Mesiah Hameed on Mott Street below Prince Street around 2:50 p.m., said the teenager was obstructing police movement before she was detained. “She was blocking the scooters from going,” he said. “Civil disobedience. Somebody grabbed her, one of the deputy inspectors.” Read more…

On Monday, just a couple of weeks after Occupy Wall Street’s Illuminator rolled through the East Village, the neighborhood’s walls were lit up once again. This time the art wasn’t political: it was created by Dawn of Man Productions, a collective specializing in guerrilla projections. Check out their far-out, far-up work in The Local’s video.

Photos: Tim Schreier

More than a thousand people rallied in Union Square on Wednesday evening with the parents of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager who was shot dead in Florida in late February. The protest, dubbed “A Million Hoodies March for Trayvon Martin” on Facebook and elsewhere, attracted an angry and racially diverse crowd of New Yorkers.

“We’re not going to stop until we get justice for Trayvon,” Tracy Martin told the crowd of his son, according to The Lede. “George Zimmerman took Trayvon’s life for nothing.” Mr. Zimmerman, a white Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer, shot the teenager after telling a 911 dispatcher he had seen a “black male” who “looks like he’s up to no good.” A controversial self-defense law has kept him from being charged.  Read more…

The Police Department has released stomach-churning footage of alleged Occupy Wall Street demonstrators dumping a disgusting mix of what is said to be human waste in a bank and a stairwell last week.

According to the police department, surveillance cameras captured protesters on March 14 dragging a tub filled with a mix of urine and feces into a public plaza at Nassau and Cedar Streets at 8 p.m. They then poured the concoction down a stairwell. About 20 minutes later, another camera caught a man dumping waste inside of a Chase Bank on Water Street. A witness gave investigators the license plate number of the van allegedly used to haul the smelly brew, and two days later they arrested 25-year-old Jordan Brooks Amos of Philadelphia. Mr. Amos is charged with unlawful possession of noxious matter, aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, and criminal possession of a weapon due to a stun gun that was allegedly in his vehicle.

The gross video was immediately met with shock — and some skepticism — on Twitter.

City Room reports that a total of six protesters were taken into custody during this morning’s clashes between police and Occupy Wall Street protesters in Union Square. Charges include resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and obstructing governmental administration. Meanwhile, a non-Occupy demonstration protesting what many say is a lack of justice in the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin is slated to occur in the park this evening.

Jared MalsinA demonstrator taunted officers with a doughnut on a string.

At least one person was injured and another arrested when police confronted Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in Union Square early Wednesday morning.

Shortly after midnight, police moved protesters, some of which had been sleeping in the park since Saturday night, off of the south steps of the square and onto the sidewalk before sweeping through the encampment and rousting reclining protesters.

Police arrested activist Yoni Miller, 18, of Brooklyn, dragging him away by the shoulders. In an interview with The Local moments before his arrest, Mr. Miller said, “I think we will eventually be arrested.” Read more…

Jared Malsin

Could Union Square be the next Zuccotti Park? Earlier this afternoon, a group of Occupy Wall Street protesters said that they had decided to attempt an indefinite occupation there, although few were confident that police would allow them to stay for long.

“We reached consensus today to try to make this a permanent occupation,” said Darah McJimsey, a 23-year-old activist who came to New York from California in November to join the Occupy movement full-time. “Although we’re aware of what we’re up against, and we’re going to draw on our skills as far as being mobile.”

The decision to launch an open-ended occupation of Union Square was made by 20 to 30 activists who came there after police forcibly dispersed around 500 people from Zuccotti Park on Saturday. The Union Square group, which has spent two nights there, appears to have attracted support from the broader movement. Occupy Wall Street’s website now features a call to “Occupy Union Square.” Read more…

A little over a month after Superman climbed the George Washington statue in Union Square Park, an Occupy Wall Street protester – wearing a keffiyeh instead of a cape – climbed onto George’s horse early this morning and held court for about 40 minutes. NY1 has footage of police officers escorting the man to an ambulance after he finally came down, and reports that about 50 protesters spent the night in the park.

Jared Malsin MoRUS founders Laurie Mittelmann, left, and Bill
DiPaola, right.

After seven months of negotiations, the creators of the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space have finally signed a lease and are busy fundraising, compiling photos and video, and renovating the storefront inside the legendary collective building C-Squat, where the East Village’s first squatting and homesteading museum will be housed.

The signing of the lease on Thursday with the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board marked the formal launch of the project, which is already staging what organizer Laurie Mittelmann calls “spontaneous tours” of squats, community gardens and other sites of street-level confrontation with police and developers over the control of urban space in the East Village since the 1970s.

On Tuesday, The Local visited the Museum’s dedicated video compiling facility (we were asked not to disclose its location), where two of the project’s 30 volunteers were hunched over computers logging video onto hard drives. (Time’s Up has donated over 400 hours of footage to the museum.) On one video, police were issuing a ticket to performance artist Reverend Billy during a 2006 demonstration.

During our visit, Ms. Mittelmann and co-director Bill DiPaola spoke about their vision and plans for the new museum. Read more…

Jared Malsin The Illuminator

Maybe you saw the messages beamed, Bat-Signal-like, on the wall of Cooper Union’s new academic building on Saturday? Actually, it was just one of two spectacles related to Occupy Wall Street in the East Village that night.

“It is the beginning of the beginning. Another world is possible,” read the messages. The final one beamed on the steel facade of 41 Cooper Square was the original Occupy slogan: “99%.”

This was the maiden voyage of The Illuminator, a white cargo van modified by a group of Brooklyn-based guerilla artists. A 12,000-lumen projector emerged from its roof while clanging post-rock blared from a set of mounted loudspeakers. Also attached to the van was a rack of books available for public perusal, a mobile version of Occupy Wall Street’s “People’s Library.” Read more…

Tompkins Square Park looked something like Zuccotti Park in its heyday yesterday, as a giant Statue of Liberty puppet shimmied to a beat thrashed out by a cohort of drummers. Next to them were the People’s Library, a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream cart, and a “Parents for Occupy Wall Street” station crawling with children.

Activists said the single-day occupation – the third to be organized by the group Occupy Town Square – was part of the movement’s process of reorganizing in the wake of the police eviction of the original Occupy encampment.

“We lost a few things when we lost Zuccotti,” said Jonathan Jetter, one of the event’s organizers. “We lost a place where the movement could come together to network amongst itself.” Read more…

Bob Simmons Tuli Kupferberg

The funniest part of reminiscing about the uber-subversive East Village Other for The New York Times is that the latter set me on the road to rebellion before the former was even founded in 1965. I’m told I was reading by age four and within a few years the first section I grabbed when the Sunday Times arrived every weekend was the Book Review. The Grove Press ads kidnapped my imagination: Who was this Alain Robbe-Grillet guy and how do you pronounce his name?  Why was William Burroughs considered so dangerous and did his characters have meals while wearing no clothes? And speaking of clothes, how come the girls on Grove’s covers wore so little?

Obviously my nascent libido was ready for plucking, but my fascination was not simply sexual. I wanted to know why in the land of the First Amendment some had wanted to ban these books.

I bought my first issue of the Village Voice in February 1966; it contained an obituary of the abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann. Already a Dylan fan, I scanned the ads for folk clubs and was absolutely smitten by bohemia. The first girl who won my heart in elementary school was Jessica Hentoff (I don’t recall my feelings being reciprocated) and her father Nat wrote for the Voice. Soon I picked up the Voice’s competitor, The East Village Other.

No friends’ parents wrote for EVO. Scruffier, funnier and dirtier than the Voice, EVO was not simply about bohemia, it was an anarchist’s bomb in newsprint hurled at the bourgeoisie. Even at my tender age, I knew that I didn’t like the world that grown-ups had created. The troublemakers at The Other were expressing themselves in ways I could only daydream about at that point. Read more…

Photos: Stephen Rex Brown

Chanting against Mayor Bloomberg and Monsanto, protesters marched from the Bank of America on Second Avenue to the bed-in at Washington Square Park. “I want to go on the offensive against the ‘get a job’ people,” said Roman Shusterman, an unemployed 30-year-old from Brighton Beach who was holding a sign with an unprintable message about jobs.

“The whole world should demand better food,” he added in regards to Monsanto. “But we’re in a position to challenge our government, so why not?”

Jared Malsin

A dozen Occupy Wall Street demonstrators staged a “bed-in,” inspired by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 anti-war protests of the same name, at Washington Square Park this morning. The group brandished flowers and took turns lounging on a mattress while inviting passersby to join them in bed. (Just in case anyone is feeling really lonely this Valentine’s Day.)

“Imagine every mattress in New York City – or maybe, who knows, the planet, since the Internet allows us to have this dialogue – every mattress, indoors or outdoors, becoming a stage for free speech and public expression and even human expression,” said Alexandre Carvalho, 28, an activist with a group called Revolutionary Games.

Mr. Carvalho added, “Because it’s boring to be political all the time. Maybe you can just be in bed with your friends and just talking about what it means to be living a happy life.”

Daniel Maurer At Eighth and Avenue B.

In a show of solidarity for Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested in Oakland, a group marched from Washington Square Park, as far north as 29th Street, and then back south to Tompkins Square Park – with a symbolic stop at the former Charas/El Bohio community center. Witnesses reported smashed bottles and arrests in the East Village last night.

Shortly before 10 p.m., protesters who had gathered at Washington Square Park three hours earlier made their way to the former P.S. 64 building on East Ninth Street, which was at the center of demonstrations last month. As The Local has reported, some residents want the developer who owns the vacant building to use it as a community center again.

After hearing a few words about the building’s history, the group – escorted by a column of police officers in the street – walked down Avenue C, then Eighth Street, and then Avenue B before stopping at East Seventh Street, at the entrance of Tompkins Square Park. Read more…