Reading through the Occupy Wall St website/blog, it seems pretty clear that the group planned to march across the bridge. Here’s part of the post announcing the march:
> Therefore we invite the public, our fellow 99 percent, to join us in a march on SATURDAY AT THREE, starting from LIBERTY PLAZA (ZUCCOTTI PARK) at LIBERTY & BROADWAY.
>
> March will end with a gathering and some eating at Brooklyn Bridge Park 5:30 pm.
Google Maps tells me that Brooklyn Bridge Park is in Brooklyn, on the other side of the bridge.
Just to be clear, I don’t think they did anything wrong by attempting to march on the bridge. Like Doug I question the value of pissing off drivers, but that’s just a tactical point where I could possibly be wrong. I am worried though about one of the narratives that the police forced the group onto the bridge. If my reading of the above blog post is correct, then this narrative of what happened is not true, and easily refuted stories such as this can be damaging to credibility.
At any rate, I will be off with my copies of Wall St to Zuccutti Park this afternoon (after a quick stop at Mamoun’s :-)). It’s a delicious coincidence that today happens to be an anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth.
On Oct 1, 2011, at 11:19 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
> Response XXX: It was the cops who shut down traffic for hours on both sides when the bridge could have been crossed and cleared after minutes of pedestrian use on one side.
Shane, 10 minutes or more for a group of people to move across a bridge causes more than just 10 minutes of traffic delays. My *guess* based on near 20 years of driving in and out of Manhattan is that the scale would be exponential. Again, I am not deriding the marchers. I am only wondering if it was tactically smart. I do realise that sometimes protestors have to push the boundaries, but that doesn’t seem to work (the expected way) in the USA. :-(
—ravi