OCCUPY WALL STREET, the protest encampment at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, has many historical inspirations. After all, the tactic of sitting down and refusing to move was used by angry veterans marching on Washington in the early Depression years, striking automobile workers in the late 1930s and civil rights protesters in the 1960s. But there is a local precedent, one that few people remember today: the sit-ins and “occupations” that followed New York City’s deep budget cuts in 1975 and 1976.
In the spring of 1975, amid a recession and mounting anxiety about municipal bookkeeping, the banks that had long marketed the city’s bonds refused to do so any longer. To regain access to the bond market, and under pressure from Albany and Washington, Mayor Abraham D. Beame proposed a series of austerity budgets, slashing funds for schools, libraries and firehouses and, for the first time, charging tuition for the City University of New York.
Leaders of public sector unions organized a mass march on Wall Street to protest the cuts. They criticized the First National City Bank (forerunner of Citibank) for failing to support the city in its hour of need. They urged members to cancel their accounts and withdrew union funds from the bank.
When the first cuts were made in early July, protests swept the city. Laid-off police officers rushed onto the Brooklyn Bridge, their still employed brethren reluctant to make arrests. Sanitation workers went on a wildcat strike, leaving garbage piled up in the South Bronx and on the Upper East Side alike.
Perhaps the most creative acts of resistance occurred in November, when the city shut Engine Company 212, a fire company in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Tipped off to the imminent closure by an air-raid siren, residents occupied the fire station, refusing to leave or to let the fire engine be driven away. They slept and ate there, and held meetings every Tuesday night that were open to the community and attracted large numbers of activists. After a 16-month occupation, the firehouse reopened.
The people of North Brooklyn had had good reason to be afraid. The neighborhood was filled with wood-frame buildings and the city was in the midst of an epidemic of fires. But their anger was not only about immediate dangers; they saw the plan as part of a larger, systemic failure to address the needs of working-class New Yorkers.Continue reading the main story
The cutbacks also prompted outrage elsewhere in the city. Students sat in at Hostos Community College in the Bronx to protest a plan for its closure. People wrote their elected officials letters to object to the cuts. They fumed as services deteriorated. They were angry at Washington, which Mayor Beame argued was more interested in bailing out bankrupt corporations (like the Lockheed Corporation) than in aiding the nation’s largest city. But more deeply, New Yorkers feared being shut out of the political life of their city. Occupying public institutions was a way of reclaiming them, of insisting that the city should work for all those who lived in it.
Those who balanced New York’s budget in the 1970s by cutting services have long been celebrated as saviors, while the wave of protest that swept the city has been largely forgotten. Much separates that time from our own; the city’s fiscal crisis had different causes than the financial meltdown of 2008, and even conservatives then were wary about suggesting that the collective bargaining rights of public sector employees be curtailed or terminated.
But today, as people around the world face the contraction of the public sector, the demonstrations of that time seem oddly prophetic, a first salvo of protest against the age of austerity we still live in today. Then as now, people protested the power of a small economic elite to decide the fate of cities and even nations. Then as now, the damage done by cutbacks falls most heavily on those who do not have the vast wealth needed to retreat into a private sphere. New York did not go bankrupt in the 1970s, but it became economically polarized in the way that the people who occupied Engine Company 212 — which was shuttered again in 2003, the victim of another round of budget cuts — feared it might. And that is why Zuccotti Park has become the center of a new movement today.Continue reading the main story