Occupy Wall Street

Can a utopian community bring hope to a run-down neighborhood?

Adam King, founder of the Atwater Resource Cooperative, at his home in Fair Haven. When Adam King ’88 looks at Atwater Street, he sees wealth. He sees it in the overgrown backyards that could become gardens, in the rundown houses whose extra rooms could become common spaces, and in the out-of-work residents whose skills could transform the neighborhood. Atwater is in Fair Haven, one of the poorest areas of New Haven, Connecticut. King was originally attracted to this neighborhood, which lies to the east of. . . Read more

A lunch break with the demonstrators on the New Haven Green.

A string of multi-colored Christmas lights and the blue-green glow of sunlight filtered through tarp illuminate the food tent at Occupy New Haven. Several cardboard signs bluntly demand that occupants clean up after themselves. The food tent is known more officially as the Food/Library Tent. Half is for food, and half is called the lounge, according to demonstrator Jim Ferrara, a construction worker by day. “This is us basically,” he said, waving a hand at four mismatched chairs, a makeshift bookcase crammed with paperbacks, a. . . Read more

An observer of this spring’s protests in Madrid visits Occupy Wall Street.

One sign read, “Our economy could be more fair.” Well, that was what it was all about, I guess. As I wandered through the crowd at Occupy Wall Street on a Saturday last month I saw that all the usual suspects were out. Dreadlocked, shirtless, smelly backpackers littered the ground with their wool blankets and blue plastic tarps and gave each other back massages. Mixed in among them, middle-aged, bald anticapitalists handed out Socialist Party literature and The Occupied Wall Street Journal and told anyone. . . Read more