I took the above photo 11 years ago today: December 17, 2011.
It might be my favorite of all the images I captured during my time with Occupy Wall Street (OWS).
A little context: Trinity Wall Street Church (TWS) is located about a block away from the original OWS site, Zuccotti Park. TWS owns about six million square feet of Manhattan real estate — worth about $6 billion. This reality dates all the way back to a 1705 land grant from England's Queen Ann.
A few of those approximately six million square feet of Manhattan real estate are where the OWS/TWS rift truly commenced.
Shortly after the Zuccotti Park/Liberty Square eviction in November 2011, as Nick Pinto explained in the Village Voice, “protesters asked the church for sanctuary in an unused church-owned plot in Duarte Square. The church refused, and on December 17 (2011), the protesters, led by clergy including retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard, jumped the chain-link fence anyway, prompting dozens of arrests.”
The events of December 17, 2011, resulted in OWS occupying the sidewalk in front of the church for more than a year. Even the New York Times covered the event.
The image above was taken just outside that empty church-owned plot as the arrests happened.
Surreal when you consider, that just a short decade later, many of those protestors would fall in line and worse, become "soldiers" for the tyrants, masked up and ready to take a trusting jab. Wow.
Just one of many churches in NYC. I am a native NYer of 50 years. Now in warm and sunny Fla.