Some of this city’s most luxurious hotels are lodging nearly 5,000 Republican delegates, from The Drake on Park Avenue to the new Ritz-Carlton in the Financial District.
The digs for the tens of thousands of demonstrators protesting the GOP are decidedly more modest–youth hostels on the Upper West Side, futons in Queens, even a rooftop in Brooklyn.
When a political party holds its national convention on the country’s most expensive bit of real estate, the protest set has to make do.
“People with like ideas shouldn’t have to pay for housing. We’re all brothers and sisters in the movement to end the war, to fight the Bush agenda,” said Peter LoRe, 21, a student at Hunter College.
For this week, LoRe’s two-bedroom apartment in Queens is the temporary home for two activist friends from Portland, Ore., an organizer from the Ralph Nader campaign and two students from the Campus Antiwar Network.
“The place is a mess,” LoRe said with a grin.
Some accommodations are dicier than others. When a group of travelers arrived last weekend, they initially couldn’t find a place to stay.
“We crashed in an alley the first night, down in the Bowery,” said an 18-year-old woman who would give only her first name, Faery. But “we had some problems with crackheads, so we went to Casa del Sol.”
A community center in the South Bronx, Casa del Sol is one of hundreds of locations throughout New York that linked protesters with their hosts through message boards on activist Web sites.
Peter Rozing, 25, a construction worker from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., had been trying to line up a place to stay through the rncnotwelcome.org housing board. He had no luck until he arrived Saturday night.
“At the last minute, I found a spot in Queens,” Rozing said Tuesday as he relaxed in the courtyard of St. Mark’s Church, an East Village institution that is serving as a gathering place for demonstrators.
Across the courtyard, small groups of protesters quietly discussed their “direct action,” in one case retooling their planned acts of civil disobedience because not enough fellow activists had shown up.
Tuesday was supposed to be a day of scheduled mayhem: street theater and other protests scattered throughout midtown and lower Manhattan.
Many of the events made their point with humor, including the Fox News Shut-Up-A-Thon, in which more than 200 protesters gathered outside Fox News headquarters shouting “Shut the Fox up!”
Police had expressed concern that a small number of provocateurs could incite violence amid the otherwise peaceful dissent. But the vast majority of the more than 500 arrests made Tuesday–bringing the total to more than 1,000 since protests began last week–were for disorderly conduct, according to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
The biggest clusters of arrests Tuesday occurred when a group called the War Resisters League sought to march from ground zero, site of the former World Trade Center, to Madison Square Garden, where they planned a “die-in.”
A text message sent to demonstrators at 3:32 p.m. suggested some groups were struggling to maintain the level of participation evident Sunday, when a huge anti-war march rolled past the Garden.
“About 100 people at war resisters vigil–ground zero, need more,” the message read. The response was modest: An additional 400 demonstrators arrived.
But the police swooped in with orange netting and arrested 200 of them for disorderly conduct for allegedly refusing to get out of the street.
The turnout may have been light because some protesters already have returned home. Nancy Hoch and her husband, Gene, housed 10 demonstrators in their Brooklyn row house. But all had come for Sunday’s big United for Peace and Justice march and had left by Monday.
Hoch, 51, was eager to do her part for the anti-Bush forces, but a little nervous about housing a bunch of strangers.
“It wasn’t clear who the people would be,” she said. “We connected through the Internet.”
Her hesitation evaporated when eight twentysomethings from Michigan rolled up in a van and a car late Saturday. A recent high school graduate from Maryland and a man from San Diego joined them.
“New York City can be very overwhelming for people who don’t know how to get around, and it’s very expensive,” Hoch said. “I wanted to support people who were willing to make the trip here and be a visible opposition to the Bush agenda.”
Such generosity continued as the week wore on.
Rozing, the Pennsylvania construction worker, stayed with one host Saturday and Sunday and another Monday night who told him he could stay the rest of the week if he liked.
But Rozing had to return home Tuesday night.
“I have to get back to work,” he said. “Vacation’s over.”
