The Bull Tied to Occupy Wall Street

The Day September 17, 2012, 9:00 am

By CLYDE HABERMAN

With a full year having passed since it came into being, Occupy Wall Street is noting the moment in a manner that reflects one of the things it does best. It is celebrating itself.

The Day

Clyde Haberman offers his take on the news.

That's what the movement did for a while on the 17th of each month. It organized demonstrations to announce, Hey, we're a month old. Yo, try two months old. Look at us, it's been three months.

Now it is a year. And so quite naturally on this Sept. 17, and over the weekend leading into it, there were demonstrations intended to show that Occupy Wall Street embodies a Sondheim number from “Follies”: “I'm Still Here.”

Actually, there hasn't been much discernible movement to this movement of late. Whatever energy it drew from its single-minded insistence on taking up permanent residence in Zuccotti Park dissipated after the police broke up that encampment last November.

The most enduring occupation of all has been one conducted by the police themselves, in Bowling Green. A year ago, they put “Charging Bull” under siege, and have maintained the encirclement nearly nonstop ever since.

“Charging Bull” is better known to many New Yorkers as the Wall Street Bull, an 11-foot-tall, 7,000-pound bronze statue by Arturo Di Modica. It has been around for nearly 23 years. Perched on a traffic island on Broadway in the financial district, it has become an enduring tourist attraction. Foreign visitors - Asians in particular seem enamored - flock t o the anatomically graphic statue to be photographed touching it front, back and under.

But when the Occupy protests began last September, the police threw metal gates around the bull, ostensibly to protect it from possible harm. For months, except on a few occasions, visitors could not get past the barriers. That restriction was eased in the spring, with tourists permitted to pass through a narrow parting of the gates. But the barricades remain. So does an ever-present police car and a couple of officers.

In early summer, the local community board unanimously passed a resolution urging that the gates be removed as an unsightly and potentially hazardous intrusion.

No one has been more passionate than Arthur J. Piccolo, chairman of a group known as the Bowling Green Association. Indeed, “passionate” does not begin to capture the depth of Mr. Piccolo's feelings about caging bull. He has described the police siege as unnecessary, as a “militarizationâ € of Wall Street and as “an overtime scam” costing taxpayers many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“There's no justification for those barricades or that police car blocking the bull,” Mr. Piccolo said in an interview.

“The fact is there has not been a single case of vandalism from the former Occupy Wall Street,” he said. While not a fan of the protesters, he said “there was absolutely no logic why anybody from their movement would come and damage the bull. And they never did.”

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman, said no plans to remove the barriers were in the works. “They're continued to be used periodically for crowd control when at times people crowd around the sculpture and spill into traffic on Broadway,” he said in an e-mail.

This explanation makes no sense to Mr. Piccolo. “We went practically 22 years without any special attention from the Police Department whatsoever,” he said. “If the polic e feel they need - which is open to question - to protect this plaza, they should do it the same way they protect other locations in the city, with less obnoxious methods.”

For his part, he said he would observe the Sept. 17 anniversary simply by “noting that this abuse has been going on for a year.”

Wall Street is trying to go about its business as well, anniversary protests notwithstanding.

It might be noted that as demonstrators rolled into action Monday morning the stock market stood at its highest level in nearly five years. The Dow Jones industrial average ended last week 18 percent above where it was on Sept. 17 a year ago. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index was up by more than 20 percent.

All in all, things seemed to be going O.K. for the 1 percent and for many in the 99 percent who are invested in the market.