Forum Post: Wall Street, a Long History of Occupation

‘BLOODY’ GREEN Zuccotti Park was first called “Liberty Plaza” for good reason. It’s situated in a neighborhood that has been the site of struggles for liberation ever since European colonists first arrived. Occupy added one more chapter to an area already steeped in a history of resistance.

The first blood of the American Revolution was shed just a few blocks away from Liberty Square, when one of the most prominent of New York's Sons of Liberty led 2,000 men in erecting a Liberty Pole at the intersection of Liberty Pl. and John St. Together with their mulatto leader Joseph Allicocke, the rebels erected the Liberty Pole as a rallying point for anti-imperial demonstrations; the one at Liberty Place was so sturdy that the British only managed to saw it to bits three years later. Thereafter, the City Corporation refused to permit the erection of further Liberty Poles, but one of the Sons of Liberty, wielding his private property rights as a means of asserting collective American autonomy, bought a piece of land adjacent to City Hall Commons. There the Sons of Liberty erected the fifth and sturdiest of the Liberty Poles thusfar, spiked with nails in all directions, the tallest structure in New York.

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