Demonstrators Test Mayor, a Backer of Wall St. and Free Speech

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has expressed his support for free speech while disagreeing with the message of Occupy Wall Street.

By KATE TAYLOR

Shortly before noon on Wednesday, the barricades that impeded foot traffic along Wall Street for weeks came down. Elected officials praised the mayor. Shopkeepers breathed sighs of relief.


But just seven hours later, the barricades went back up. Occupy Wall Street protesters were on the move, and the police were worried they would flood the street.


Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who over the last seven weeks has struggled publicly with how to manage New York City’s response to the demonstration Occupy Wall Street, on Thursday offered a staccato analysis of his administration’s latest effort at finding a way forward:



“Taken down. People marched in the streets. Put up. We’ll try again.”


The decision to remove the barricades, followed by the quick reversal, was emblematic of the quandary that has vexed Mr. Bloomberg and his administration since a few hundred people critical of the nation’s economic inequities first bedded down in Zuccotti Park on Sept. 17.


Mr. Bloomberg’s evolving response to the protest has come to embody a central tension in his third term, between his celebration of free, and at times cacophonous, speech as a hallmark of New York, and his emphasis on bolstering the city’s economy by improving its appeal to residents, employers and tourists. Mr. Bloomberg, who is generally known for his decisiveness, at first emphasized his disagreements with the protesters, then began describing them as peaceful dissenters exercising a fundamental liberty. In the last several days, he has sounded increasingly exasperated, a reflection of complaints from neighbors and accusations of criminal activity in Zuccotti Park.


“There is no easy answer,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters on Thursday morning. “But there is a right answer, and the right answer is allow people to protest, but at the same time enforce public safety, provide public safety and quality-of-life issues, and we will continue to do that.”


Since Sept. 15, when a reporter asked him about the planned protest — “First I heard about it,” he responded — Occupy Wall Street has come to dominate Mr. Bloomberg’s public time. He was asked about the movement while marching in a Columbus Day parade, painting the finish line for the New York City Marathon and visiting Jerusalem. His attitude toward the protesters has been parodied on “Saturday Night Live.” At one point, he felt compelled to disclose that he did not talk about Zuccotti Park while in bed with his girlfriend.


The mayor is in an awkward position — while the protesters proclaim themselves “the 99 percent,” Mr. Bloomberg, with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $19.5 billion, is an elite member of the top 1 percent, the 12th richest person in a nation of 312 million. His wealth derives from Wall Street, the target of the protesters’ ire, and he has repeatedly made clear that he does not support the demonstrators’ arguments or their tactics.
“My personal view is, why don’t you get out there and try to do something about the things that you don’t like, create the jobs that we are lacking, rather than just yell and scream,” Mr. Bloomberg said Thursday. “But if you want to yell and scream, we’ll make sure you can do it.”


Mr. Bloomberg has managed simultaneously to be less sympathetic to the protesters’ point of view, and more sympathetic to their right to protest, than some other elected officials around the nation. “There’s nobody that’s more of a defender of the First Amendment than I am,” he has often said.


In Oakland, Calif., protesters have been furious with the mayor, Jean Quan, since the police used tear gas at a demonstration; this week, a march there attracted thousands and forced the port to close. In Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa had been accommodating, giving the protesters ponchos during a rainstorm, but has more recently said that their encampment “cannot continue indefinitely.”


In New York, the protests have altered life at City Hall. Mr. Bloomberg meets daily with an unofficial protest task force, made up of the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly; the fire commissioner, Salvatore J. Cassano; two deputy mayors, Howard Wolfson and Caswell F. Holloway; and the head of the city’s Law Department, Michael Cardozo. Many evenings, he calls Mr. Wolfson or Mr. Holloway for an update before he goes to sleep.