Our streets: the early days of Occupy Wall Street

A few hours before I was arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge, I met Nicole in Liberty Park. She wore tight dark blue jeans, a grey sweater and a blue and white scarf that hid behind her long auburn hair. She wore the same pink lipstick she had on at the bar when we met. It was our first date.

Nicole had arrived a few minutes before me, and someone with a pile of quarter sheets with legal advice had given her a stack to hand out. While we stood on the corner she distributed flyers, always saying: “Protest is not a crime.”

“I work for a law firm so the legal stuff interests me,” she explained.

“How long have you been in the city?”

“Just since I found this job, so a few months — protest is not a crime,” she interrupted herself to hand out another flyer. “It doesn’t pay all that much but I live in Harlem and rent is cheap there.”

Occupy Wall Street was two weeks old, and growing quickly. On September 17 protesters armed with sleeping bags had descended on Zucotti Park, renamed it Liberty and set up camp in the heart of the financial district downtown. I had stopped by the first day out of curiosity, but I had no faith that it would amount to anything. All that year, starting in Tunisia with the Arab Spring, unusually powerful protest movements had rocked the world…