It’s official: Zuccotti Park is now a real, live circus — complete with a series of big new tents designed to turn the area into a giant carnival.
And neither Mayor Bloomberg — nor the technical owner of the park, Brookfield Properties — seems to care much.
Too bad for Lower Manhattan — and the rest of New York.
The squatters are erecting what they vow will be more than two dozen large tents to replace the small ones there now. They’re hoping the bigger tents will help them better weather the winter cold. And each will house more people, to protect them from . . . each other.
“We don’t want anything bad or unsavory happening behind closed doors,” an Occupy Wall Street spokesman explained.
Looks like the deadbeats are about to become permanent residents. (They’ve even got events scheduled online through 2025.)
And they’re certainly right to fear one another: Sexual attacks and other crimes have become daily sport at Zuccotti, as Candice Giove reported in Sunday’s Post.
“The threat of rape is very real here — for women and men,” she wrote after spending a night at the encampment and hearing first-hand stories of sexual assault.
(Police are the last to find out about the attacks — if they’re ever notified at all — thanks to the OWS omerta code.)
Meanwhile, local shops feel terrorized: “I’ve been told ‘Watch your back!’ 10 times,” says Stacey Tzortzatos, of nearby Panini & Co. Breads, as The Post reports today.
Workers in the area say they’ve been threatened and harassed for criticizing the protesters or refusing their demands. Shops have been trashed or seen their sales dive. Legal residents are at their wits’ end.
What’s City Hall’s response?
Ho-hum — not our problem.
Bloomberg is playing the same game he’s played all along: passing the buck to Brookfield officials, on the technical grounds that it’s their property and their choice to act or not.
Convenient, huh?
In fact, Brookfield’s rules prohibit any tents, large or small. But Brookfield refuses to enforce them — or even to discuss the matter.
And Bloomberg just repeats: “[It’s] not our rule. A question for the property owner,” as New York magazine reported.
The idea that squatters — many of them criminals or suffering from mental illness — can take over a New York block and set up their own permanent city, while the mayor and property owner do absolutely nothing, is beyond mind-boggling.
As we said last week, this fiasco has gone on long enough.
The city has a right — indeed, a duty — to shut it down.
It’s long past time it does so.