People's History of Wall Street Walks

09/24/2016

An excellent project by the best mapmaker in Occupy Wall Street

A new “field guide” by Ingrid Burrington makes visible the infrastructure of surveillance in New York, and explains the money and politics behind it.

05/02/2016

"For centuries, May Day has been a time when the stirrings of spring lead people of good will towards visions of revolutionary renewal. The powerful wish to take these dreams away from us. They never will. And so it is on this May Day, in the wake of a growing planetary uprising for justice, we dare to look forward to a world when the borders that divide us will be made meaningless, to the birth of genuinely democratic culture of communities managing their own resources for the common good, and where the value and dignity of no human being on this planet is considered inferior to any other."

50,000+ people answered Occupy Wall Street's call on May Day, 2012

09/07/2015

Labor Day, as an explicitly anti-socialist, de-radicalized day for workers, was introduced in opposition to May Day, an international workers' holiday binding workers across borders, customs, language, in common in the fight against capitalist class. In this way, Labor Day isolated American workers from solidarity with workers abroad, perhaps even creating a divide between the American and the international labor movements.

Labor Day was promoted by the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor. The Knights of Labor was a populist labor organization promoting the 8 hour day, with strong connections with the Free Masons.

After the Haymarket Massacre, which occurred in Chicago on May 4, 1886, U.S. President Grover Cleveland feared that commemorating Labor Day on May 1 could become an opportunity to commemorate the affair. Thus, in 1887, it was established as an official holiday in September to support the Labor Day that the Knights favored.

The very first Labor Day was held on a Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, as ten thousand workers marched in a parade starting just above Wall Street, from City Hall to Union Square.

08/07/2015

One of the duties of People's Historians: Exposing Race Baiters. Poor white folks, know your history! Don't be duped.
Https://youtu.be/lLgIIjnpZyU

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07/31/2015

From freshwater pond to dumping ground.
From Paradise, to Columbus Park.

Today it's Columbus Park, in Chinatown. But it's originally one of the centers of gravity for the Lenape nation, the village of Werpoes, on the southernmost pond at the southern tip of Manahatta. Thousands live at its southwestern edge. The Dutch colonists build a wall to keep the Lenape out of Fort Amsterdam, but this means that they cut off their access to the main source of freshwater for Lower Manhattan.

Then Africans move here, to the periphery of the Dutch and English colonial settlement. The Dutch call the land on the other side of the ramparts wall that becomes Wall Street, 'Land of the Blacks'. They offer "half-freedom" to the Africans willing to till the land beyond the Wall and to ward off the Lenape.

By the early 1700s, the village of Werpoes, once thousands strong, is obliterated, and the Lenape are slaughtered down to 200 throughout the whole of Manahatta from Long Island to Brooklyn. Werpoes now becomes the site of the first Free African settlement in New York.

The colonists tear down the wall, and now they have regular access to the freshwater. The English construct a promenade and recreation ground on the bluffs around the shoreline where once the Lenape grew crops and baked the clams they collected from the sea.

Soon, it becomes a wastewater pit called the Collect Pond, contaminated after factories are constructed around its rim. A cholera epidemic ensues, and it corresponds with the arrival of waves of Irish Americans. A simple correlation is made - the Irish must have a tendency towards cholera, perhaps they brought it with them.

A major effort is made to preserve the area, by filling in the Collect and constructing Paradise Park. But Paradise Park quickly turns to little more than marshy infill, spongy, soupy. The Protestant Founders abandon the area for the north, once and for all. Those lacking the means to move out, stay behind, and the area becomes an Irish and African neighborhood known as Five Points.

Five Points comes to be known as the worst slum in the world, and its residents are stigmatized. What was briefly Paradise Park is more known for nearby Murderer's Alley.

At night, Africans spilling out of the saloons around the marshy park are doing the hustle, and Irish spilling out of the pubs are doing the jig, and at the center of that park, a new danceform is being created: tap dancing.

When Italians move in, the park is known as Mulberry Bend. Then Columbus Park. Today, elders living in Chinatown sit year-round playing mah jong, Chinese checkers, string instruments. And they take shelter from the rain under the Works Progress Administration shelter built by workers during the Depression.

07/31/2015

Have you ever wondered what lies at the foundations of the World Trade Center? What it obliterated? The answer: The last remnants of New York's first Arab neighborhood.

Little Syria was a significant landing place for Arab emigrants, hosting a literary movement featuring the likes of Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, an early theorist of Arab nationalism. It flourished for nearly a century, until it vanished under the WTC jackhammers in 1967.

Ironically, in 1970 hundreds of workers building the WTC joined in an attack on anti-war activists, in front of Federal Hall. Construction workers strode from 4 directions, carrying American flags and signs that read "All the way, USA," and "America, Love it or Leave it." They converged on about a thousand student anti-war demonstrators in their teens and early 20s. "We came here to express our sympathy for those killed at Kent State and they attacked us with lead pipes wrapped in American flags," said one 19-year-old. This pro-war, pro-Nixon mobilization came to be known as the Hard Hat Riot.

Many years later, a planned Islamic Center devoted to interfaith dialogue, Park 51, was scheduled to be constructed down the street from the WTC. After 9/11 the project was derailed, as a series of right-wing Islamophobic protests converged on the site.

07/31/2015

Have you ever wondered what lies at the foundations of the World Trade Center? What it obliterated? The answer: The last remnants of New York's first Arab neighborhood.

Little Syria was a significant landing place for Arab emigrants, hosting a literary movement featuring the likes of Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, an early theorist of Arab nationalism. It flourished for nearly a century, until it vanished under the WTC jackhammers in 1967.

Ironically, in 1970 hundreds of workers building the WTC joined in an attack on anti-war activists, in front of Federal Hall. Construction workers strode from 4 directions, carrying American flags and signs that read "All the way, USA," and "America, Love it or Leave it." They converged on about a thousand student anti-war demonstrators in their teens and early 20s. "We came here to express our sympathy for those killed at Kent State and they attacked us with lead pipes wrapped in American flags," said one 19-year-old. This pro-war, pro-Nixon mobilization came to be known as the Hard Hat Riot.

Many years later, a planned Islamic Center devoted to interfaith dialogue, Park 51, was scheduled to be constructed down the street from the WTC. After 9/11 the project was derailed, as a series of right-wing protests converged on the site.

07/17/2015

Why's it so important that we remember that Occupy emerged of many prior movements going back a hundred years, all of them in some way unresolved? We have so much to learn from the difficult decisions made by prior movements - especially around the politics of prioritizing one concern over another, and tabling key issues in the process. Just as importantly, looking back a bit helps us keep our work in perspective - especially when we consider movements that took on the monumental behemoth which is capitalism. AFTER ALL, JUST AS ANY MOVEMENT STARTED TO TAKE ON THE ROOTS OF RAMPANT INEQUALITY, THAT MOVEMENT WAS BRUTALLY REPRESSED.....
http://occupywallstreet.net/story/8-really-new-things-about-occupy-wall-street

Occupy Wall Street brought together tools, networks, and messages developed by thousands of people over decades.

07/08/2015

In 2011, Chris Cobb showed up for the Occupy Wall Street movement. One of the first things he did was push for demarcation of the auction block once erected directly on Wall Street. Last week, after years of other people and organizations calling for a marker of this tragically important site, the marker was erected in the void. When one person stays focused, stays the course, as Chris did these past 3 and a half years, tangible shifts can and do happen. Http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/1147314

Near the corner of Wall and Pearl streets, where businessmen and tourists plod below the towering office buildings and banks that loom over the East River, are the buried bones of one of the nation's

07/08/2015

“My eyes are wide open, and still I’m there and not there. My body is pumping with adrenaline. My anxiety is extremely high...."

"From Her Body Came Their Greatest Wealth", Wall Street, New York, from the White Shoes series, Copyright Nona Faustine New York has a reputation for being

06/10/2015

JOIN US THIS SUNDAY, June 14th! 12:30 PM, for a Participatory Wall Street Walk starting at Bowling Green, as we tell the story of American capitalism from the People's point of view. Space is limited, so please RSVP: [email protected]

Together let's undo the mystique of this infamous marketplace, from the foundations of the United States at Federal Hall, to its crumbling under Tammany Hall.

We'll remember the process by which a private corporation, the Dutch West India Company, first expropriated the lands of the Lenape Indian nation. We'll excavate the Wall against which abducted Africans were sold by the day or the week. We'll consider the ways the Gilded Age was a precursor to 21st Century collusion between corrupt economic and political actors.

And most importantly, we'll unearth sites of resistance, finishing at the site of the most recent uprising in the Wall Street area. Occupy Wall Street is not the first movement to rise up against injustice and greed. It won't be the last.

At four of the stops, the walk leaders will lead you in a participatory process, revealed as we go. Through this walk, we will be rooting our very concept of “The Commons”, from our soles, up. Many of us have become so unmoored and rootless, we have lost our sense of what is Ours. But our mutual survival depends upon an understanding of what it is that belongs to us all in Common.

DURATION: Come on out for two hours of time travel followed by about three quarters of an hour of in-the-now reflection and discussion. We'll reflect alone, and in pairs at stops along the way, and finish with a circle at Liberty Square...And by the end, maybe we'll even gain a better understanding how to free ourselves of Wall Street's grip!

*Rain or shine so long as it's over 70 degrees (barring a climate catastrophe)
*Day-of contact: (414) 979-9255

Contribution: BRING a fresh vegetable
FREE/By donation (to cover cost of printed materials)

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/17/wall_street_a_history_of_occupation_partner/

It's been happening for centuries