letter

from

new

york

city

SOME ASSEMBLYREQUIRED

Witnessing the birth of Occupy Wall Street
By Nathan SchneiderUnder the tree where the International Society for Krishna Consciousness was founded in 1966, on thesouth side of Tompkins Square Park in
the East Village, sixty or so people
gathered in a circle around a yellow banner that read, in blue
spray paint, general assembly ofnyc. It was Saturday, August 13,
the third of the General Assembly’s evening meetings. On theside of the circle nearest the tree
were the facilitators—David
Graeber, an anthropologist at the
University of London, and Marisa
Holmes, a young filmmaker who
had spent the summer interviewing revolutionaries in Egypt.
“No cops or reporters,” Graeber decreed at the start of themeeting. Others demanded a banon photographs.
I raised my hand and explained that I was a journalist
and an edit­or of the blog Waging
Nonviolence, which covers movements for peace and justice. I promised not to take pictures. Just then, aheavyset man in a tight T-shirt, withpatchy dark hair and a beard, started
snapping photos. He was Bob Arihood, a fixture of the neighborhood
known for documenting it with his

Nathan Schneider is a writer living in Brooklyn.

camera and his blog. People shouted
at him to stop; he shouted back something about the nature of public
space. Finally, a few from the group
got up to talk things through withhim, and the discussion turned backto me. After half an hour of interrogation and harrowing debate, I witnessed for the first time an act of consensus: hands rose above heads,
fingers wiggled. I could stay. A little
later, I saw that Arihood and thepeople who’d gone to confront him
were laughing together.
Those present were mainly, but not

This page (detail) and overleaf: “Zuccotti Park, Trinity Place [October 5, 2011],” by Susan Wides. Wides’s
work appears in New York in Color, by Bob Shamis (Abrams, 2011), and is on view this month at Howard
Greenberg Gallery, in New York City. All photographs © Susan Wides, courtesy Kim Foster Gallery, N.Y.C.

Schneider Final6 cx2.indd_1220 45

exclusively, young. When they spoke,
they introduced themselves as students, artists, organizers, teachers.
There were a lot of beards and handrolled cigarettes, though neither
seemed obligatory. Elders, such asa Vietnam vet from Staten Island,
were listened to with particularcare. It was a common rhetoricaltic to address the group as “You
beautiful people,” which happened to be not just encouraging
but also empirically true.
Several had accents from revolutionary places—Spain, Greece,
Latin America—or had beenworking to create ties amongprodemocracy movements inother countries. Vlad Teichberg,
leaning against the Hare Krishna
tree and pecking at the keys of apink Dell laptop, was one of thearchitects of the Internet channel
Global Revolution. With his
Spanish wife, Nikky Schiller, he
had been in Madrid during the May
15 Movement’s occupation at Puertadel Sol. Alexa O’Brien, a slender woman with blond hair and black-rimmed
glasses, had covered the Arab Springfor the website WikiLeaks Central andhad been collaborating with organizers of the subsequent uprisings in Europe; she had also been trying to foment a movement called U.S. Day of
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Rage, named after the big protests in
the Middle East.
The meeting would last five
hours, followed by working groups
convening in huddles and in nearby
bars. I don’t think I’d seen people
talking politics like this since early
2003, when some of us thought wecould avert a war in Iraq if ourchants were loud enough. When the
war happened anyway, despite someof the largest global protests in history, activism seemed to give way tothe complacent cynicism of The
Daily Show. Some people here wereyoung enough not to remember andcould shed the irony long enough to
get serious about something again.
But their anxiety was visible when apolice car passed, and conversation
slowed; a member of the Tactics
Committee had pointed out that, as
any group of twenty or more in a
New York City park needs a permit,
we were already breaking the law.
Fault lines were also already
forming. There were those who
liked the idea of coming up with
one demand, and those who didn’t.
Some wanted regulation, others
revolution. I heard the slogan “We
are the 99 percent” for the firsttime when Chris, a member of theFood Committee, stood up andproposed it as a tagline. There were
murmurs of approval but also calls
for something more militant: “We
are your crisis.” When the idea
came up of having a meeting on
the picket line with striking Verizon workers, O’Brien blocked consensus. She didn’t want the assembly to lose its independence. “We
need to appeal to the right as wellas the left,” she said.
“To the right?” a graduate student
behind me muttered. “Wow.”
Just about the only thing everyone could agree on was the fantasy
of crowds filling the area around
Wall Street and staying until they
overthrew corporate oligarchy, or
until they were driven out. As theevening grew darker, a pack of­intern-aged men walked by, looking
like they had just left a bar, and noticed the meeting’s slow progress.
One of them, wearing a polo shirt,
held up a broken beer mug andshouted, at an inebriated pace, “Ifyou always act later, you might forget the now!”
Bob Arihood died of a heart attack at the end of September. By
then, Occupy would be spreading
fast. One of his photographs of themeeting survives on his blog, theonly picture of its kind I’ve found.
In that cluster of people around thebanner, almost everyone is looking
toward the photographer; a man
dressed in white is pointing into
the lens. Some look curious, some
suspicious, some scared, some indifferent. I’m barely visible in thefar corner of the group.
I recognize most of the others now
in a way I didn’t then. Some have
had their names and faces broadcast
on the news all over the world.
T here’s t he wom a n f rom L aRouchePAC with such a good singing voice, and the group who hadgone to high school together inNorth Dakota. When I showed Arihood’s picture to a friend, he recognized his former roommate from art
school. I try to guess what the ones I
know best were thinking, what itwas exactly that they were doing
there—so expectant, so at odds with
one another, so anxious
about being watched.

I

had been watching revolutions
from a distance since the beginningof the year, when people rose up
and expelled dictators in Tunisia
and Egypt, stirring up Libya, Bahrain, Syria, and Jordan. Continuallyrefreshing my news feeds, with Al
Jazeera on in the background, I
tried my best to write each day
about whatever was happening in
the Middle East. I wanted to understand where these movements camefrom, who organized them, andhow. Experts in the United States
were satisfied attributing the uprisings to global food prices and Twitter, but the revolutionaries themselves didn’t use the language of
economic or technological determinism. In interviews, they seemed
instead to have rediscovered theiragency, their collective power, theirability to act.
By late February, Egyptians werephoning in pizza-delivery orders to
the occupied Wisconsin State Capi-“Zuccotti Park, Broadway [November 2, 2011],” by Susan Wides

Schneider Final6 cx2.indd_1220 49

tol. With summer, unrest followed
the heat north to Greece, Spain,
and England. Europe’s summer was
Chile’s winter, but students andunions rose up there too. Tel Aviv
grew a tent city. While Tahrir
Square was still full, the anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters published a blog post proposing “A Million Man March on Wall Street.”
The United States seemed to go
quiet after Madison, though, its politics again domesticated by the debt
ceiling and the Iowa Straw Poll.
When thousands marched on WallStreet on May 12, few noticed andfewer remembered.
But while following the marchthat day on Twitter, a thirty-twoyear-old drifter using the pseudonym
Gary Roland read about anotheraction planned near Wall Street for
the next month: Operation Empire
State Rebellion, or OpESR. That
tweet led him to a dot-­c ommerturned-activist-journalist named David DeGraw. In the spring, DeGraw
had been working with members of
the “hacktivist” collective Anonymous to help build safe online networks for Arab dissidents, but since
early 2010 he had also been writing
about his vision of a movement closer to home, a movement in which
the lower 99 percent of the UnitedStates would rebel against the rapacity and corruption of the top 1 percent. An Anonymous subgroupformed to organize OpESR, callingitself A99.
Through DeGraw’s website, Roland
helped make plans. Having recently
lost his job as a construction manager
for a real estate firm, he was familiar
with New York City’s public spaces.
He proposed that OpESR try to occupy Zuccotti Park, a publicly accessible square block just north of WallStreet owned by Brookfield Office
Properties. On June 14—Flag Day—
Zuccotti Park would be their target.
Anonymous-branded videos announcing the action had begun toappear in March and got hundreds ofthousands of views. When the day
came, though, only sixteen people
arrived at Chase Manhattan Plaza,where the march to Zuccotti was tocommence, and of the sixteen only
four intended to occupy. Roland deLETTER FROM NEW YORK CITY   4912/20/11 2:39 PM

cided to join another occupation thatwas beginning the same day near City
Hall, a few blocks north. Organized
by a coalition called New Yorkers
Against Budget Cuts, the so-called
Bloombergville occupation would
turn into a three-week stand against
the city’s new austerity budget. It
didn’t seem to amount to much on its
own, but it eventually proved to beanother step building toward something that would.
“The attention we were able toget online,” David DeGraw wrote
after the flop on the fourteenth,“obviously doesn’t translate into
action.” Consoling himself withthe thought that they were spreading awareness, he started talking
about trying again on September
10, a date chosen in deference to
the Anonymous convention of operating in three-month cycles. But
then, on July 13, Adbusters sent out
a call in the idiom of a Twitterh a s h t a g : # O C C U P Y WA L L STREET. With their proposal camea poster, an image of a ballerina
posed atop the Charging Bull statue, with police in riot gear partly
obscured by tear gas in the background. Red letters at the top of
the poster asked what is our one
demand? At the bottom, in white,
it said september 17th and bringtent. With that poster, more or
less, the magazine’s logistical guidance ended.
Almost at once, Twitter accounts,
Facebook pages, and IRC channels
started appearing and connecting.
“#OCCUPYWALLSTREET goes viral,” Adbusters announced in a “tactical briefing” on July 26. The following
day, Alexa O’Brien’s U.S. Day of Ragedeclared its support for the occupation. Her press releases and tweets
were so widely disseminated that people started referring to Occupy WallStreet and U.S. Day of Rage interchangeably. By early August, when Al
Gore told Keith Olbermann, “We
need to have an American Spring,”
activists all over the country were already fumbling toward an
American Autumn.

I

had first heard about plans to occupy Wall Street at a meeting of an
entirely separate group that, since50    HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2012

Schneider Final6 cx2.indd_1220 50

April, had been planning anotherindefinitely long occupation of asymbolic public space. The October
2011 movement was a coalition of
mainly middle-aged veteran activists
who intended to occupy Freedom
Plaza in Washington, D.C., startingon October 6, in time for the tenthanniversary of the war in Afghanistan. Two of them would also become regulars at the General Assembly meetings in Tompkins Square
Park—a couple who had fallen inlove at protests over the past few
years, in jail after an action at theSupreme Court and in Cairo duringa mobilization against Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip.
On August 23, an Adbusters
email featured a video of Anony­ eadless-man logo and amous’s hcomputerized voice declaring support for Occupy Wall Street. There
were rumors that the Department ofHomeland Security had issued awarning about September 17 andAnonymous; Anonymous bombarded mainstream news outlets withtweets demanding that they covert he stor y. Rep or t s ab out t heplanned occupation trickled out
slowly, though, and mostly online.
They betrayed the biases of the Internet: much discussion of Adbusters, U.S. Day of Rage, andAnonymous, but hardly anything
about the NYC General Assembly—which, despite not having anactive website, still constituted theclosest thing to a guaranteed turnout on the seventeenth.
Among the most prolific earlychroniclers was Aaron Klein of theright-wing website WorldNetDaily.
His reports claimed that September
17 would bring “Britain-style riots,”that “Day of Rage” was a reference tothe Weather Underground, andthat—who else?—George Soros wasbehind it all. Because the Service
Employees International Union’s
Stephen Lerner had been murmuring
about acts of civil disobedience targeting banks, Klein concluded thatthe union was involved, together
with the remnants of ACORN.
None of it was true, but it was exactly the kind of vast left-wing conspiracy that Klein had outlined in his
book, Red Army: The Radical Net-

work That Must Be Defeated to Save
America, which was scheduled for release in October. Before most Americans had heard of Occupy WallStreet, Klein’s gumshoeing inspired a
new fund-raising and lobbying campaign from the conservative AmeriPAC: “On September 17th,” the titleof one solicitation warned, “Socialists Will Riot Like Egyptians in All Fifty States.”An occupation, by definition,
has to start with people physicallypresent. Social media, even withwhatever aid and cachet a group likeA nony mou s might lend, i sn’t
enough—witness the failure of
OpESR. Until August 2, when the
NYC General Assembly began tomeet near the Charging Bull statue at
Bowling Green, #OCCUPYWALLSTREET was still just a hashtag.
That first meeting was hosted by
New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts,t he c o a l it ion b eh i nd Blo ombergville, which had been in contact with Adbusters. What was advertised as an open assembly beganlike a rally, with Workers World
Party members and others making
speeches over a portable P.A. system to the hundred or so people
there. But anarchists started toheckle socialists, socialists heckled
back, a nd the meeting melted
down. Those who stuck around got
what the anarchists wanted, andperhaps more: an assembly, microphone-free and in a circle, thatdragged the 4:30 p.m. event on until 8:30, with some staying aroundto talk until 11:00. Working groups
formed to do outreach, to produce
independent media, to provide
food. The General Assembly would
continue to meet once a week.
The second meeting I attended,on August 20, was relatively productive at first, even if it was short onconsensus. The group couldn’t, forinstance, make any outright commitment to nonviolence, largely because
they didn’t agree on what it would
mean to do so. No text for the Outreach Committee’s flyers could be
passed. But people wiggled their fingers in the air when they liked what
was being said, and wiggled themdown at the ground when they“Zuccotti Park, Liberty Street [November 17, 2011],” by Susan Wides

12/20/11 2:39 PM

LETTER FROM NEW YORK CITY   51Schneider Final6.indd_1215 51

12/15/11 12:26 PM

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didn’t, so through these discussions
everyone knew better what the restof the group thought and could proceed with that in mind. I was learning that the point of a consensus
process like this is often less to makedecisions than to hear one another
out; individuals and subgroups canthen act autonomously, respecting
the assembly while sparing it theburden of micromanagement.
Soon, though, even that modicum of process started to fail.
Georgia Sagri, a performance artist
from Greece, paced around the periphery of the circle with a large
cup of coffee, making interjections
whether or not she was recognized
as “on stack” to speak. She seemed
less interested in planning an occupation than in the planningmeeting itself. “We are not justhere for one action,” she declared.
“This is an action. We are producing a new reality!” The pitch of her
voice rose and then fell with every
slogan. “We are not an organization; we are an environment!”
Sagri’s powers of persuasion anddisruption were especially on display when the discussion turned to
the Inter net Committee. Drew
Hor nbein, a red-haired, wispybearded Web designer who lives in
Brooklyn, had started putting together a site for the General Assembly. Sagri thought he was doingit all wrong. She didn’t trust the security of the server he was using—
not that she knew much about servers—and wanted to stop depending
on Google for the email group. Herconcern was principle, while his
was expediency.
As Sagri and her allies denounced
Hornbein publicly, he apologized asmuch as he could, but he eventually
got up and left the circle with others
who’d also had enough. “I’m talking
about freedom and respect!” Sagri
cried. “This is not bullshit!”
She held the floor for hours, proposing every detail of what the website
would say and how it would look, reading one item at a time from her phone
and insisting that the General Assembly approve it. The facilitators seemed
exasperated. A passerby began playing
Duck-Duck-Goose on the shoulders of
those sitting in the meeting.

The thrill I’d felt the previous
Saturday turned to pretty thoroughgoing disappointment. I abandoned my reportorial post: I leftearly, after three and a half hours.
On the way out, I ran into thecouple I knew from the October 6group, who were just arriving fromanother meeting in Harlem. I updated one of them—Tarak Kauff, who
served in the Army in the early
1960s and can still do a hundred
pushups—on what had been goingon for the past few hours. None of it
appeared to surprise or trouble him.
“It’s really, really hard,” he said in his
Queens accent, as the Internet Committee proposals ground throughconsensus a few steps away.
“They’re doing fine.”T

he August 27 GA meeting
didn’t happen, because there was ahurricane that weekend—weird for
New York City, just like the earthquake a few days earlier. I missed
the following weekend’s meeting
because I went to the October 6group’s retreat at Kauff’s house up
in Woodstock, where a dozen organizers holed up for two nights anda long day, eating well, singing
protest songs, and debating the insur rectionar y theories of Gene
Sharp, the scholar who from hishome office in Boston has helped
inspire revolutions as far away as
Serbia and Egypt. Everyone in thegroup came with some deep well ofexperience—a Ralph Nader campaig n ma nager, a pediatricia npushing for single-payer healthcare, the gruff Veterans For Peace
whose youthfulness returned tothem with any talk of tactics. After decades of trying leaderless activism, they affirmed to one another that leadership was sometimes
okay. But it was conspicuous that
only the very youngest—a soberminded thirty-eight-year-old Israeli
who managed their website—hadmuch Internet expertise.
Sketching notes on giant sheets ofpaper on an easel, they started by assessing what their proto-movement
was up against, and what its strengths
and weaknesses were. While debate
about Adbusters’ “one demand” idea
had come to an impasse in Tompkins

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M

y next chance to go to an
NYC General Assembly meeting
was on September 10, a week before the date Adbusters had named.
The facilitators this time were especially expert— impatient withof f-topic speeches and creativewith synthesizing what was said
into passable proposals. Things got
done. But really, most of the work
was already being handled by thevarious formal and informal committees that had grown out of theGeneral Assembly. On September
1, nine people had been arrested
while attempting to sleep legally on
the sidewalk of Wall Street as a“test run,” and a video of it was
getting traction online. A student
group was rehearsing a flash mob to
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” The
Food Committee had raised $800,
about a quarter of the goal for supplying water and peanut butter
sandwiches—the only funding that
I heard mentioned. The National
Lawyers Guild would be sending
observers in green caps. More thanany one plan, there were plans.
I didn’t see Georgia Sagri there.
Gary Roland showed up with an actress he’d met at Bloombergville.
They had left on a bike trip aroundthe country but then decided tocome back to see what would happen on September 17. Enough people came on the tenth that for the
first time the facilitators had to demonstrate the “people’s microphone,”which would become a hallmark of
the movement; the speaker addresses the audience in short phrases, andthose who can hear repeat them inturn for the benefit of those who
can’t. Less can be said that way, andless quickly, but more actually tends
to be heard.
In the three weeks since the last
GA I had attended, the mess hadcongealed into common wisdom.
Frustrations were past, folded into
the present, and turned into lessons.
Some of these planners would laterbe accused of belonging to a secretleadership cabal behind the leaderless movement; if they were, it was
the result of nothing more mysterious than having come to know andtrust one another after a month anda half of arguing, digressing, and, occasionally, consensing.
The Tactics Committee gave its
report. An occupation right inf ront of t he Sto ck Exch a nge
seemed unfeasible and overly vulnerable. The previous week, theGA had decided to convene an assembly on the seventeenth at Chase
Manhattan Plaza. Tactics was coming up with contingencies, and contingencies for contingencies, in casethat didn’t work. In all likelihood
there would be a legal encampment
along sidewalks, just like the one
many in the GA had set up at
Bloombergville. Despite Adbusters’
initial suggestion to “bring tent,”
and the rapper Lupe Fiasco’s promise to donate fifty, tents would probably be too risky—though it all depended on how many people would
be there and what those people
would be willing to do. As in Cairo
and Madrid, the encampment would
have to form itself.
Keeping tactics loose might also
be safer. Everyone assumed there
were cops in the group; I, for one,had my short list of suspects. The
less you plan ahead, the less they
can plan for you. The NYPD’s ever y move against Occupy WallStreet would seem so inept, andwould bring only a backlash of
LETTER FROM NEW YORK CITY

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53

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Square Park, the decision to abandon
demands was more thoroughly considered in this group. For months already,they had been developing a fifteenpoint set of demands, on issues ranging from military spending to public
transportation, but now they started
thinking that the movement wasn’t
strong enough, not yet, to make demands heard. Instead, their goal would
be to host an open conversation attheir occupation in the capital, an actof resistance to the illegitimate politics
of Washington. The concluding topic
of the retreat, after Goals and Strategy and Tactics were settled, wasMessage. Over wine that Saturdaynight, the group tripped and turned
over words until finally landing on
something that would let them go to
bed satisfied: “It Starts Here.” Theslogan was destined for obsolescence;by the time they pitched their tents
in October, they would
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12/20/11 3:00 PMsympathy for the occupiers, in part
because neither the police nor anyone else knew what to prepare forat any given time.
By this point, the idea of making asingle demand had fallen out of fashion. After a month and a half ofmeetings, the organizers were getting
addicted to listening to one anotherand being heard. Rather than the
Glass–Steagall Act or campaign-­
finance reform, they were talking
about making assemblies like thisone spread, around the city andaround the country. It was as if
Georgia Sagri had won after all: theprocess of bottom-up direct democracy would be the occupation’s chief
message, not some call for legislation
to be passed from on high. They’dfigure out the rest from there.
I was still wrapping my headaround this. Everyone was. This
was a kind of politics most had never quite experienced, a kind apparently necessary even if its consequences seemed eternally obscure. I
was starting to realize, also, what apotent message you’re sending to a
corrupted democracy if you bringsome real ­democracy—where people can speak and money can’t—to
the symbolic center of that corruption. Maybe assemblies like this
could even become a new basis fororganizing political power on alarger scale.
Of course, in the months tocome this would be exactly what
happened; as the call to occupy
spread, assemblies followed. From
Boston to Oakland to Missoula,Montana, activists wiggled fingers
in horizontally structured meetings, using a common language todiscuss problems both local andglobal. Just as was hoped for, just as
was planned. But the fact that
there was a plan doesn’t mean thatthe plan was complete, or reassuring, or guaranteed to have the intended effect.
A spree of decisions passed byconsensus the night of the tenth.
There would be no appointed marshals or police negotiators; if thepolice wanted to negotiate, it would
have to be with the whole assembly.
The GA would start on the seventeenth at 3:00 p.m.—“and if we’re in

jail we start it there.” A few rebellious minutes after ten, when thepark was supposed to be closed, themeeting ended, and wewent out for drinks.

Throughout the week before
September 17, there were committee
meetings, civil-disobedience training
sessions, and warm-ups: the Arts &Culture Committee put on midday
yoga classes and speak-outs in frontof the New York Stock Exchange.
Anonymous threatened a fearsome
attack on bank websites. No one
could know everything that was
happening, much less whether it
would work. “Maybe the General
Assembly has been the really big
central planner, but I don’t know,”
Drew Hornbein told me that week
over sandwiches in Brooklyn. “Theremight be a lot of other stuff goingon.” I mentioned the October 6group, and he asked me to send him
some links. If Wall Street didn’t
work out he could help with that.
Occupation was on my mind constantly as the date approached, but it
was still a mostly secret fixation. I
saw occupy wall street september
17 scrawled in chalk near the fountain in Washington Square Park. On
the whole, though, the city’s landscape seemed innocent of what was
being planned for it—if what was
happening was really planning at all.
On September 16, the night before whatever it was was slated to
begin, I opted to pass on covering acivil-disobedience training to satisfy
my curiosity about an occupationthemed Critical Mass bike ride setting out from Tompkins Square
Park. (Online, Anonymous associated the ride with something called“Operation Lighthouse.”) A criticalmass there was not, unless you
counted the police, who were stationed at every corner of the parkand periodically motorcycled by tomonitor the handful of bicyclists
waiting in vain for more to turn up.
The bicyclists accepted soup andcoffee from enterprising evangelists
and obtained a tepid blessing for tomorrow’s undertaking. Rather thaninvite the police to form a motorcade around the group, those present decided to leave the park one ata time and regroup downtown for ascouting mission.
After riding down to the Financial
District and passing by Wall Street, I
stopped in front of a boxing match
two blocks away from the New York
Stock Exchange. Seeping out fromthe Broad Street Ballroom, an inexhaustible electronic beat surged undera looping bagpipe track. Well-­decorated couples and gaggles paid
their $45 per person to slip throughthe doors and into the crowd surrounding the ring, where two sinewy
fighters were bouncing back andforth, punching and kicking eachother. They were following Thai-stylerules, but the scene looked more likethe last days of Rome. Along the backwall stood a row of Doric columns.
On the sidewalk, looking in anda r o u n d, I r e c o g n i z e d M a r i s a
Holmes from the General Assembly meetings. We noted each otherknowingly, like spies, and maybe
for a moment even questioned
whet her to ack nowle dge t h at
knowing publicly. But we did, andwe exchanged our reconnaissance.
She had just been down at Bowling Green, where a Department ofHomela nd Securit y tr uck wa s
parked. Barricades surrounded theCharging Bull statue like a cage. I
told her I had been up at Chase
Manhattan Plaza, north of WallStreet, and it was also completely
closed off. A stack of barricades sat
in wait just across a narrow street.
She looked worried. We stood in silence and watched as the fight ended, the combatants making a gestureof good sportsmanship. Holmes continued north to Wall Street, and I
got on my bicycle to go home.
Nights in the Financial District
are desolate, even ones with scattered boxing fans and police officers
preparing for God-knows-what. One
can feel the weight of the buildings
overhead, all the more because there
are so few people around to help bear
the load. The buildings seemed completely different, however, while I
rode home over the Manhattan
Bridge. They were distant, manageable, and light. Rolling high above
the East River and looking back atthem, I wondered if they had anynidea what was coming. 		

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