By Matthew Russell Lee
LOWER MANHATTAN, November 15 -- Two months after Occupy Wall Street began in Zuccotti Park, and two days before a called-for actual occupation of Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange, Mayor Michael Bloomberg sent hundreds of riot equipped police to remove all demonstrators from the park, which they had renamed Liberty Square.
Text message alerts began at 1 am, and by 3 am structures in the park were coming down: the tent from which protesters had been fed, the much publicized library with its lights run by bicycle powered generators, the First Aid tent.
The evicted and their supporters regrouped ten blocks north in Foley Square, where protests to major banks' "robo-signing" foreclosures had taken place.
During its (first?) two months based in Zuccotti Park, the Occupy Wall Street movement marched on nearby JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, and headed to midtown Manhattan to Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. To some, the call to target the New York Stock Exchange itself on November 17 triggered Mayor Bloomberg's reaction.
In Foley Square, it was announced that a court order - a Temporary Restraining Order - now allowed the demonstrators to return to Zuccotti Park, at least until an 11:30 am hearing. A march set off around City Hall -- "hey hey, ho ho, our billionaire mayor has got to go" -- and then up to Canal Street and Sixth Avenue. There the police stopped it, telling Inner City Press, if you do not move back you will be arrested.
It was 10:30 am, with only an hour left on the (first?) court order. And so Inner City Press headed back south.
