On Wednesday morning in the miniature tent city across the street from Tompkins Square Park, protesters were getting ready.
The official announcement from the city was made four days earlier: A cleanup team will remove any belongings that the campers did not remove themselves. This is the seventh sweep in six weeks at the site in Manhattan’s East Village, which has become the starting point for a small but vocal protest to Mayor Eric Adams’ campaign to remove the streets. homeless street in New York City.
Five tents line the sidewalk under the scaffolding of a closed school, a strip that people who live there call Anarchy Row. “Human life is enclosed (not thrown away),” reads a sign posted on a tent.
Dozens of officers, a cleaning truck and a homeless outreach worker arrived.
An audio recording plays from the police loudspeaker: “You are hindering the Sanitation Department from doing their job. You are ordered to leave the area so they can clean up. ”
No one moved.
Within minutes, eight people were arrested, most from anti-eviction and community aid groups, and charged with obstructing government regulation. All willing except Johnny Grima, 37 years old, a homeless man who has emerged as the mass face of the movement. As an officer wrestle him out of his tent and carried his body towards a police car, a man shouted: “Shame on you. Is that how you treat the homeless? ”
It has been more than a month since Mr. Adams announced his plan to rid the city of plantations. The goal is to convince people to move to shelters. Results have been mixed so far. Between March 18 and May 1, there were more than 700 cleans – many in the same location – and 39 people “accepted the position,” according to statistics released by the mayor’s office on Thursday. Three. Officials implied that the locations were in shelters but did not provide details on where people came from.
They also did not say how many of those 39 people stayed where they were placed. Typically, most of the homeless on the street who accept an outreach worker’s offer of shelter leave within a few weeks, often back on the street.
At many of the dozens of barracks that police and cleaning crews have cleared around the city, tents will reappear in a day or two. But in and around Tompkins Square Park, the refusal to evict has taken on a clear political tone.
On Wednesday, Mr. Grima was the only homeless person arrested. Others come from groups including the Rent Denials Network and the Brooklyn Deportation Defense.
City sweeps were a frequent tactic of Mr. Adams’ predecessor, Bill de Blasio – the number of city sweeps remained the same under Mr. Adams. But while Mr. de Blasio rarely talks about the sweeps, Mr. Adams has made them central to what he says is an effort to restore order to the city’s streets.
Mr. Adams said in a statement on Tuesday.
Some advocates have urged Mr Adams to stop the sweeps and focus on opening more beds in specialized shelters, commonly known as safe havens, that offer more privacy and less space. rules than traditional shelters, something many homeless people avoid. Mr. Adams recently announced plans to add more than 900 beds in dedicated bunkers.
Mr. Grima and some of the more idealistic activists wanted something more: permanent housing for every homeless person in the city.
“They have 250,000 empty apartments in the city, man,” Mr. Grima shouted as police surrounded the plantation. “Why am I homeless? Why are my friends homeless? ”
The Tompkins Square protests continue to be a tradition in the park of left-wing and anti-government protests dating back to at least 1857, when 4,000 people gathered for a Confederation of American Workers rally to claim jobs and aid the unemployed. During the Civil War, soldiers’ wives protested the cessation of public relief, and in 1874, at the park’s first all-out riot, Police officers swinging club ropes into the crowd among thousands of unemployed are asking for a program of public service.
Fast forward to Tompkins Square Park Riots of 1988, when efforts to impose a curfew at the park resulted in a clash between police and protesters, including homeless people camping there. The following year, a tent city returned to the park and torn apart again.
In 1991, the tent city, which had grown to about 200 people by then, was dismantling again, and the park was closed for six months. The the night it reopenedMore than 100 people defied the curfew, including some climbing trees, and 14 were arrested.
In recent decades, even as the East Village has been given a makeover and the park has been cleaned up with manicured plantations and well-groomed dogs, the tents have barely remains, although in much less quantities. Parks are so synonymous with prisons that in February the TV show “Law and Order” set up a cluster of tents to shoot, on the other side of the park from a homeless encampment.
At a scan on Anarchy Row on April 6, a small number of campers and their supporters refused to leave voluntarily for about seven hours, before police moved in and arrested them. Two days later, one rally in the park resisting the deportation attracted about 100 people.
Video Scenes of police brutally handling homeless people and their belongings have gone viral on social media, complicating Mr. Adams’ attempt to portray the dismantling of prisons as a employment for the benefit of the homeless themselves.
A mile south of Tompkins Square Park, in Chinatown, the sweeper team hit another plantation, on Eldridge Street, on Wednesday. Several similar anti-eviction activists who would later be arrested in Tompkins Square were there to observe, but there was no resistance to Eldridge.
The three largely homeless men dismantled the camp by themselves, pulled blankets off the scaffolding, and loaded their belongings into carts. “They’ll be back tomorrow,” said a cashier at a nearby corner snack shop, who gave only her name, Sierra.
One of the homeless men, Pete Johnson, was away when the dump truck arrived. Sanitation workers threw some of his possessions out, but despite the trouble, Mr Johnson, 34, said neither he nor his friends went to a shelter in the city. He said outreach agents lured him and a friend, Neil Singh, to a shelter by showing them pictures of clean, tidy rooms.
“When you get there, it’s like a hole in the wall,” Mr. Singh said.
“We’re just waiting for the appropriate help,” Mr Johnson said.
The city planned to add three new safe havens in Chinatown, but in the past week, it has Canceled two of themafter a pressure campaign from Chinatown residents, who say the shelters will add chaos to a neighborhood already reeling from anti-Asian violence.
Before police stormed Tompkins Square on Wednesday, Sinthia Vee, 49, a 1989 tent city veteran and a musician and watercolor artist who had lived homeless for decades, was being rescued. approached by an orange-clad outreach worker from the Department of Homeless Services who provided her with a private room in a shelter.
She asked if a permanent apartment was available and was told she needed to enter the temporary shelter system first and then apply for permanent housing, an administratively fraught process that can take several days. months or years. After checking out, at a hotel 20 blocks from the neighborhood, she decided to accept.
Even before being offered shelter, Ms Vee said she had gained some valuable things from the protests.
“This whole thing got me into a performing arts show,” she said. It will be on display at a gallery in Bushwick and feature portraits of people from the tent camp.
“I’ve never had a gig before,” she said. “The strangest things happen.”
