While some of the Occupy Wall Street protesters have been able to retrieve the property they "abandoned" in Zuccotti Park during last week's raid, many of the items that were supposed to be transported to the Sanitation Department's Midtown storage depot weren't, or were damaged in the process. Most notably, the People's Library has only retrieved 1,099 books out of the total collection of about 4,000, and only 800 are still usable. At noon today, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel will join the president of the NYC Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild Gideon Oliver and members of the People's Library for a press conference at 260 Madison Ave. to address the city for destroying or losing thousands of books.
“The People's Library was destroyed by NYPD acting on the authority of Mayor Michael Bloomberg on the night of the raid," William Scott, a former OWS librarian says in a release. "In addition to all our supplies, laptops, and tent, they threw roughly 4,000 books into garbage trucks and dumpsters that were adjacent to the park, as well as assorted rare documents that were associated with OWS."
At a press conference this past weekend, Siegel criticized Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD for evicting the protesters living in Zuccotti Park at a time of day when there was as little oversight as possible. “It’s like they thought there was a life-threatening emergency here. There wasn’t. It could have been handled differently."
