The "Occupy Wall Street" protesters extended their rally to Brooklyn Bridge, where they were ticketed and summoned for blocking the roadway, authorities said late Saturday.
"Over 700 summonses and desk appearance tickets have been issued in connection with the demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge ... after multiple warnings by police were given to protesters to stay on the pedestrian walkway," said Paul J. Browne, deputy commissioner for the New York City Police Department.
Bridge traffic heading to Brooklyn from Manhattan was shut down for several hours, police said. Joshua Stephens, 33, had joined the protest march and had ended up on the Brooklyn Bridge. "The people who plotted the march did not give out the route in advance. I was a little surprised when we got down to City Hall, and people started turning onto the Brooklyn Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge is generally choked with tourists, just choked with tourists. If you are a cyclist, you just never take the Brooklyn Bridge...it's just a really frustrating experience...There's so many people on it all the time.
As we were turning to the entrance to the bridge, one of the protest people, the organizers, appeared to be cooperating with police. This march up until it went on the bridge was all on the sidewalk. People were splitting off.
The interesting thing is the cops could have stopped people from getting on the motorway at any point. You had thousands of people in that march--easily two or three thousand -- and the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge is not wide. The police would have had plenty of opportunity to prevent people [from going] down to the motorway.
Six people at a time, hoisting up over these cast iron posts. We didn't get far on the bridge before I saw cops mobilize behind us. I saw the cops march up. How the fuck are they going to arrest all these people?
The march basically stopped below us. We stopped. I saw people come up over the, like climbing up, the side of the bridge, climbing up over the railing. There were people who looked college-aged and people who looked like somebody's parent climbing the Brooklyn Bridge....
People were even advising them to stop. The only thing dramatic I saw were people climbing the bridge like Turk 182-style. Ahuviya Harel wore a Soviet flag Thursday to the first Occupy Philadelphia planning meeting, one of many efforts nationwide aiming to echo New York's two-week-old Occupy Wall Street protest against the "greed and corruption" of the richest 1 percent of Americans.
The Philadelphia group aims to capture the spirit of Occupy Wall Street, which was inspired by Adbusters, a Canadian activist magazine hoping to spark street demonstrations of the kind that toppled Arab regimes in the spring. Protesters began occupying a park near Wall Street in Manhattan's Financial District on Sept. 17.
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