Daniel Maurer Medics treat the motorcycle accident victim.Two incidents marred New Year’s celebrations in the East Village during today’s early morning hours. At Second Avenue and 13th Street, around 3 a.m., dozens of police officers moved to detain Occupy Wall Street protesters as helicopters circled over the neighborhood; about an hour later at 12th Street between Avenues A and B, a man was struck by a motorcycle and taken to the hospital in critical condition.
The motorcycle accident occurred around 4:20 a.m. When The Local arrived on the scene, a man lay facedown, bleeding onto the street, having been struck by a BMW with Maine plates as he crossed the street well away from the intersection at Avenue A. Paramedics transported him to Beth Israel Hospital, where the police said he arrived with severe head trauma and is currently in critical condition. The driver of the motorcycle, a 38-year-old male, is not suspected of criminality.
The earlier incident at Second Avenue and 13th Street occurred after protesters clashed with police at Zuccotti Park shortly before midnight. The Post reported that one officer was stabbed in the hand with a pair of scissors then, and City Room reported that just before 1:30 a.m., police officers entered the park to clear it of about 150 people, five of whom were led off in handcuffs. After a group marched north, 60 to 100 people, eyewitnesses told The Local, arrived at Second Avenue and East 13th Street around 3 a.m. There, their progress was stopped by a wall of police officers. Read more…
Tim SchreierGood morning, East Village.
The above photo is from the Occupy Wall Street Farmers March from the La Plaza Cultural community garden to Zuccotti Park. You can see more of Tim Schreier’s photos here. On Sunday, about 250 participants (by EV Grieve’s estimate) marched to promote “dialogue, solidarity and solutions to corporate control of our food system,” according to a flyer.
The Times reports that Billy’s Antiques, the tent near the corner of Bowery and Houston that has been stocked with oddities and ephemera since 1986, will close so that its landlord can start construction on a two-story building. Billy Leroy, the tent’s “Barnumesque” owner, will be allowed to reopen in the new building, but a member of his staff considers the closure “part of that final transition to a landscape of Pottery Barns and Starbucks.”
EV Grieve notices candles outside of Joe’s Bar commemorating the recent death of its owner. Read more…
If you just can’t get enough of the images coming out of Occupy Wall Street, you’re in luck: JujoMukti will be hosting a photo exhibit of the protests on Dec. 1. The Local’s photographers and videographers have filed numerous dispatches from Lower Manhattan and Union Square; one of our contributors even spent two nights behind bars. Doors open at 7 p.m. at the tea lounge on East Fourth Street between Avenues A and B. Just be careful where you park your bicycle.
Earlier, The Local tweeted and reported from the scene of the National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation. Now see video of the demonstration as it moved from Union Square, down East Eighth Street, to Avenue D – near to where Makever Brown died on the FDR Drive while fleeing the police. We spoke to the march’s organizers and attendees, including Shamar Thomas, a former Marine whose yelling at N.Y.P.D. officers last week received widespread attention, and Jean Griffin, the sister of David Glowczenski, who died after Southampton police used a Taser stun gun on him in 2004.
Daniel Maurer At Astor Place shortly before 4 p.m.Hundreds of people protesting police brutality have marched from Union Square, down Broadway, down East 8th Street and St. Marks Place, and through Tompkins Square Park heading toward Avenue D. Follow The Local and its editor on Twitter as we tweet minute-by-minute updates from the scene. Tweet us your own updates and add photos to our Flickr pool as you take them. We’ll have more from the scene as this unfolds.
Update | 7:15 p.m. The event was the October 22nd Coalition’s 16th Annual National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation. Similar marches were planned in 27 other cities today. The march ended with a gathering at Avenue D and East Sixth Street, outside of the Jacob Riis Houses, where a group of about 350 – including members of the Communist organization Ignite, Occupy The Hood, and others – listened to short call-and-response speeches.
Among those who took the bullhorn were Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (which spearheaded a “Stop and Frisk” protest that ended in the arrest of Cornel West and others in Harlem yesterday) as well as the parents of Elijah Foster-Bey, a teenager who was involved in a shootout with police in Brooklyn a year ago. “Shoot first, ask questions later is not right,” said Mr. Foster-Bey’s mother, Ellen Cross.
About 65 police officers lined Avenue D, many of them riding motor scooters and some of them surveying the scene from rooftops as demonstrators chanted, “Come down and face the truth, no hiding on the roof.” Their number had dwindled to about 20 community affairs officers by 6 p.m., when the crowd began thinning. The Stop Mass Incarceration Network will organize their next demonstration against “stop and frisk” policies during a meeting at St. Mary’s Church in Harlem, tomorrow at 2 p.m.
Update | Oct. 23, 12:45 a.m. We’ve now posted video from the demonstration. Watch it here.
Suzanne Rozdeba L.E.S. Jewels and John Penley at Occupy Wall Street.Runnin’ Scared interviews the bloggers behind EV Grieve and Save The Lower East Side to get their thoughts on why, as Save The Lower East Side pointed out yesterday, Grieve’s commenters are so dismissive of John Penley’s plans to occupy Tompkins Square Park this weekend. Says Grieve, “Some of the newer residents seem to be more interested in finding the perfect drunk brunch, tweeting about cupcakes and going out and watching, say, the Oklahoma-Texas game in sweatshirts and jerseys. Social movements are for the history books.”
Brooklyn Based notices, as have we, that Williamsburg is becoming “East Village East,” with outposts of Mama’s and Vanessa’s Dumpling House due to open later this month, and an offshoot of Cafe Mogador planned as well. “The recession really hit the East Village pretty hard and we saw our clientele dropping,” explains Jeremiah Clancy, the owner of Mama’s. “It pushed the last notion of young people out because the rents were so high.”
Speaking of Mama’s, the southern food trend continues: EV Grieve notices a Facebook update indicating that Double Wide, a “bar and southern kitchen” will open this weekend at 505 East 12th Street. Their sloppy Joes “bear only the finest ingredients.” Read more…
As expected, hundreds of students from NYU and the New School showed up at Washington Square Park Wednesday afternoon, before marching down Lafayette Street to join the Occupy Wall Street protesters. “A lot of the problems that Occupy Wall Street is addressing have a particular impact on students,” said co-organizer of NYU Student Walk Out, Christy Thornton, 32. After hooking up with what she said were 60 community groups and what the Times reported were several labor unions at Foley Square, several thousand marched on to Zuccotti Park, per the AP. In the course of the evening, about 28 arrests were made, according to NY1 (update: City Room hears that 23 were arrested), and protesters reported police using pepper-spray and batons to keep the crowd at bay. (Gothamist has video of one such incident.) As you can see from Liv Buli’s report above, the Local was at Washington Square Park to see the start of it all.
Update | 11:15 a.m. Our reporter Yoo Eun Lee was also on the scene and captured the raw footage below. Read more…
Last week, The Guardian reported that Anthony Bologna, the senior police officer who was videotaped using pepper spray on the eyes of protesters, was previously named in a lawsuit alleging police brutality at the 2004 protests of the Republican national convention. The Local has now acquired court documents, some of which are posted below, that show it is just one of nine lawsuits in which the officer is named, all of them alleging the violation of demonstrators’ constitutional rights.
The lawsuits, dating as far back as 2003, accuse Inspector Bologna of personal involvement in numerous false arrests, use of excessive force against demonstrators, and violation of free speech rights. In each of the cases, he was named alongside a list of defendants including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, police commissioner Raymond Kelly, and other senior officials.
Seven of the lawsuits resulted from the arrests of protesters at the Republican National Convention in 2004. Two earlier suits followed arrests at the World Economic Forum in 2002. Four of the cases resulted in settlements in which the city agreed to pay as much as $30,000. The other five remain open. Read more…
Phillip Kalantzis-CopeGood Morning, East Village.
Villagers continued to mourn the passing of photographer Bob Arihood on Friday. EV Grieve shares a collection of Mr. Arihood’s photographs, and Runnin’ Scared offered its own tribute over the weekend. A vigil is planned for Tuesday night in front of Ray’s Candy Store, one of Mr. Arihood’s favorite haunts.
From one artist to another, Antonio “Chico” Garcia completed a mural for The Children’s Workshop School on East Twelfth Street over the weekend. NY1 reports that the veteran graffiti artist now plans to “cap his spray cans for good.”
Garcia began his painting career 34 years ago — not long before the band Blondie started playing CBGB. The San Francisco Chronicle writes that the band has stayed true to its East Village roots with its latest release.
Read more…
The neighborhood’s renegade documentarian, Clayton Patterson, filed a dispatch from the Occupy Wall Street protests to Bowery Boogie. In a photo essay, Mr. Patterson writes that he snapped pictures of an officer trying to start a fight with protestors as an excuse to lock them up. Other shots capture the tension between the police and protestors as Occupy Wall Street approaches its second week.
Here comes the cavalry. The embattled St. Mark’s Bookshop is gearing up for the arrival of the liberal icon Michael Moore, who just announced on Twitter that tonight all royalties from sales of his book, “Here Comes Trouble,” will go to the Occupy Wall Street protests. Mr. Moore is expected to arrive at 7 p.m. at the store on Third Avenue at Stuyvesant Street. The Local’s intrepid reporter, Liv Buli, will be on hand to get his opinion regarding the bookshop’s predicament. If you spot her, say hello!
Last seen staging a “takeover” of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, activist and photojournalist John Penley is planning a press conference at City Hall on Monday to address the police’s conduct during the Occupy Wall Street protests. He tells Runnin’ Scared, “Like everyone else I just got so outraged by stuff I’d seen both personally and in some of the videos.”
