On Thursday evening, a couple dozen Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park grabbed brooms and buckets and set about sweeping up the site. For the last two days, they had begun to work harder than usual to keep the park clean and attractive, putting their brooms to work, filling up buckets of water at nearby restaurants and even, according to one protester, planting flowers.
Protesters say they are cleaning the park so that the city doesn't have to do so. On Wednesday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that Zuccotti Park would be closed temporarily at the end of the week so that sanitation workers could clean it, which they had not done since the protests began. Many of the protesters said they saw this as a ploy to get them out of the park permanently, and their suspicions were further intensified when Ray Kelly, the commissioner of the NYPD, said Thursday that they would not be able to bring back their sleeping bags and other items after leaving. The city's clean-up is scheduled for 7:00 a.m. Friday, and many of the protesters have vowed to resist any attempt at evacuation.
In a letter sent to Kelly on Tuesday, Richard B. Clark, the chief executive of Brookfield Properties, the company that owns the park, wrote, "After weeks of occupation, conditions at the park have deteriorated to unsanitary and unsafe levels."
On behalf of the protestors, a group of New York civil liberties lawyers issued a letter to Clark today in which they wrote that a sanitation group at the site has been addressing the concerns raised in the CEO's letter "all along" and has "committed itself to carrying out a thorough and complete cleaning" as an extra measure.
"Trash has consistently been bagged and hauled to established collection points and recycling rules have been strictly adhered to," they wrote, adding that the sanitation group "typically has had between one and fifteen people sweeping the Park with brooms at any time."
The lawyers concluded their letter with an offer to meet to resolve the controversy.
Brendan Burke, a protester who lives in Brooklyn, said that he runs "patrols" several times each day, pressing people to keep their spaces clean. Not everyone complies, he said, but overall, the group has been more orderly and respectful than not. Because this is New York, he found it fitting to add that he had yet to see a rat.
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