Getting the boot: A protester is subdued by NYPD officers while trying to return to Zuccotti Park yesterday, after police had shut the square down and the city cleaned up the debris. (Reuters)
Finally. Common sense and decency — not to mention ordinary rules of sanitation — reign downtown.
For two months, the lunatics had taken over the asylum, as if the right to use a park as a public outhouse was in the Constitution.
But yesterday, in a display of courage I didn’t think he possessed, the mayor got it.
He ordered the cleansing of festering Zuccotti Park.
Sexual assault, rape, thievery and the scamming of gullible people into donating their hard-earned cash for nefarious purposes — including the possible purchase of drugs — had become not the exception but the norm at the Occupy Wall Street enclave. For weeks.
Yesterday evening, Supreme Court Judge Michael Stallman proved he got it, too. He upheld the ban on tents, bedrolls and all manner of paraphernalia there.
It will no longer be easy for the Occupiers to occupy. Not if they don’t want to catch pneumonia or tuberculosis, which has broken out at Occupy Atlanta.
Still, giddy protesters yesterday showed little sign of slowing down.
A hard-core throng of Zuccotti denizens vowed last night to remain in the recently decontaminated encampment until the end of time.
Tommy Fox, 54, has slept in Zuccotti, he believes, 51 days.
Make that “52 days,’’ he corrected. “I’ve been here two months. I’ve been here seven of the eight weeks.’’
Fox said he organized the donation of apartments to protesters who didn’t care to sleep outside.
Makes him sound curiously like a member of the dreaded 1 percent of richest Americans.
For most of yesterday, until way after dark, a depleted number of Zuccotti protesters milled around, whining.
A bunch of them had spent the day holding up signs or shouting at the infinitely patient cops, who should be rewarded, not maligned, for taking abuse from silver-spoon sickos. For New York’s Finest, it’s all in a day’s work.
One man marched around the park, evidently forgetting that he was holding the hand of his young daughter. He hurled abuse at Department of Sanitation workers stationed inside Zuccotti.
Earlier, these same workers had cleaned up the filth and disease that scum like him left behind.
“Sanitation Department is scabs!’’ he railed.
At that moment, a young woman with a pierced nose and lips walked by, proudly displaying a sign that said, “F–k Bloomberg!’’
I asked a woman standing next to me with a baby in a stroller if she approved of the message. She muttered something about her baby needing to learn to read and write sometime. Nice.
The protest has run out of gas, ideas and reason for existence. But few, it seems, want the drug-and-hook-up party to end just yet.
“Hey, you got any money?’’ a tattooed, foul-smelling man went around the park asking. It wasn’t clear if he was a protester or one of the many hangers-on who have become indistinguishable from the supposedly noble breed.
The party is over at Zuccotti, but for the whining.
Good riddance.