RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Occupy Wall Street movement, now in its fourth week, has plenty to brag about. Its occasionally published newspaper, the Occupied Wall Street Journal, proclaims: “In the great cathedral of capitalism, the dispossessed have liberated territory from the financial overlords and their police army.”How did protesters manage to take over Zuccotti Park, a half-acre plot a few blocks from Wall Street? It turns out that this land grab is not due to the power of social media. Instead, the main force letting protesters stay in the park is old-fashioned crony capitalism.The Occupy Wall Street organizers were clever in selecting their protest site. Zuccotti is not a city park, where sleeping overnight is prohibited. Instead, it is one of some 500 “privately owned public spaces” that New York City officials created as part of zoning deals with real estate developers.

In the case of Zuccotti Park, the crony capitalism goes back to the 1970s, when U.S. Steel built the One Liberty Plaza office tower. In exchange for adding nine stories, city officials extracted an agreement that U.S. Steel would fund a 24-hour-a-day park across the street.

These quasipublic spaces are notorious for leaving unclear who’s responsible for what. When protesters first moved in to Zuccotti Park, the current owner, Brookfield Properties, and the city pointed fingers at each other. Brookfield cited its rules against sleeping out, excessive noise and illegal activity. City authorities—no doubt happy to have a place for the demonstrators several blocks away from landmarks such as the New York Stock Exchange—passed the buck back by saying this was Brookfield’s responsibility.

“Kids have come from all over the country for a big party in our park, and Mayor [Mike] Bloomberg has given them diplomatic immunity,” half-joked Ro Sheffe, a member of the city’s Community Board 1, representing lower Manhattan.

Brookfield rules prohibit sleeping bags, tarps and sleeping on the ground. Even if this were a public park, Supreme Court cases on the “time, place and manner” for demonstrations would clearly allow officials to stop a month-long sleepover.

Occupy Wall Street leadership and lawyers picked Zuccotti Park knowing the split responsibility for privately owned public spaces would give them a better chance to stay than in a public park. The absence of quasipublic parks explains why similar Occupy efforts failed in Washington, Chicago and Trenton, N.J., where police quickly removed protesters camping out in parks.

Last week, Brookfield finally asked the New York police commissioner for help. “The manner in which the protesters are occupying the park violates the law, violates the rules of the park, deprives the community of its rights of quiet enjoyment to the park, and creates health and public safety issues that need to be addressed immediately,” its letter to the police reads.

“Complaints range from outrage over numerous laws being broken including but not limited to lewdness, groping, drinking and drug use to the lack of safe access to and usage of the park, to the ongoing noise at all hours, to unsanitary conditions and to offensive odors.”

The Brookfield letter also notes that its security team isn’t able to screen the many deliveries of large packages to the park: “The park’s location in the financial district makes this activity particularly concerning.” This is a good point, considering that police have conducted random vehicle searches for terrorists every day since 9/11 on Broadway, diagonally across from the park.

The city agreed to Brookfield’s requests, starting with a cleaning of the park scheduled for early last Friday. But then liberal City Council members and other politicians sympathetic to the protesters strong-armed Brookfield into withdrawing its request to enforce the law.

“Brookfield got lots of calls from many elected officials threatening them and saying, ‘If you don’t stop this, we’ll make your life more difficult,'” Mayor Bloomberg said on his radio show on Friday.

No real estate developer can get on the wrong side of the city pols and zoning regulators, who review thousands of requests every year. Crony capitalism such as zoning deals are all about regulators making sure they can get their way.

Before being shut up by politicians, Brookfield spoke for hundreds of thousands of weary area workers and residents. This columnist, who lives a block from the park, can attest to the impact on the neighborhood, though I suppose I should be grateful that my newborn son is now mostly trained to sleep through late-night drumming, chanting and vuvuzela horns. Anyone tempted to idealize this movement should visit and contrast the aggressive, often drugged-out crew around the campsite with a family community still gamely rebuilding after 9/11.

Occupy Wall Street promised an Arab Spring of regime change. Protesters should know that the street bordering the park now called Liberty Street was called Crown Street from the 1600s until just after the Revolutionary War. The protesters are a couple of centuries late to our democratic revolution, but there’s still time to make a statement against crony capitalism. All they have to do is leave.