The concept rendering of the LQ Chandelier appears in the the November issue of I.D. Magazine.
PROJECT / IMAGE CREDIT »
Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
Strata Tower
An image of the Strata Tower by Asymptote Architecture was published in the New York Times this weekend. I spent a sleepless year of my life leading the design of this project and am very happy to see it under construction.
PROJECT CREDIT »
Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
Milan Design Week 2007
DesignBoom covers the minimal surface chandelier we designed for Zumtobel as it makes its debut at the Milan Furniture Fair.
PROJECT CREDIT »
Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
LQ Chandelier in Monitor Magazine
Our LQ Chandelier for Zumtobel, as collaged here by Hani, is featured alongside Zaha’s Vortex chandelier in this months edition of Monitor. This image shows a more complete idea of the as yet finished assembly, and more of the set of effects we are after.
PROJECT / IMAGE CREDIT »
Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
Carlos Miele Store
I just found this image of an early design I did for the Carlos Miele flagship store in an article about Asymptote in Metropolis. This scheme is far gone, but there were some interesting elements in there, notably the tessellated curtain of mirrors…and Gizelle.
Banff Session 2006: New Modes of Practice?
Via Canadian Architect, written by Ian Chodikoff:
This Year's Banff Session Allowed Practitioners From North America and Europe to Define the Methodology of Their Firms. the Issue of Landscape, Research, Sustainability and Rhetoric Were the Primary Issues That Were Both Defined and Defended.
Generally speaking, the 50th anniversary of the Banff Session was a huge success. And although most everyone was appreciative of the opportunity to spend a few days in Banff, some discussion is warranted on the modes of practice that were presented during the session. Beyond the wine and wild roses, one could not help but be disappointed with some of the approaches to practice being presented over the course of the event. While much of the work was challenging and inspirational, there was a considerable amount of empty rhetoric, overwrought pursuits of whimsical formal gestures and outdated diatribes on sustainability. Nonetheless, considerable attention was paid to new methods of approaching and discovering design questions relating to the landscape as well as the search for delight and invention within the urban sphere.
Former editor of Progressive Architecture and current Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota, Thomas Fisher deftly and politely moderated several panel discussions involving, among other presenters: James Cutler of Cutler Anderson from Bainbridge Island, Washington; Marlon Blackwell from Fayetteville, Arkansas; PLANT Architect Inc. from Toronto; Thomas Heatherwick from London, England; and Alex Pincus, a stand-in for his employer Hani Rashid of Asymptote in New York. Fisher’s skills as a moderator are exemplary, and he set an agreeable tone for the 26th Banff Session. However, many questions remain which should be discussed so that Canadian architects may clearly understand the difference between empty formalism and the pursuit of invention and innovation in an approach to practice.
One notable firm that believes in pursuing critical and thought-provoking work is PLANT Architect from Toronto. Led by Lisa Rapoport, along with Christopher Pommer and Mary Tremaine, PLANT presented a design process that seeks to describe a new paradigm of landscape architecture and design that eschews the temptation to label their work as simply “landscape urbanism,” “hybridized design” and “multidisciplinary platforms of practice”–catchy phraseology that can mean just about anything. Comprised of both architects and landscape architects, PLANT’s approach to design was summarized through a series of very clear questions. What is it? What does it look like? What are all the pieces? How does it all go together? How is it being built? Being able to analyze the important elements on the site and appreciating their potential involves three important steps: observation, documentation and synthesis. The projects that Rapoport presented, spanning from the well-known Sweet Farm to studies for Meadowlands, New Jersey, all examine the importance of site in terms of physical, historical, spatial and cultural paradigms.
Beginning with their studies for the Meadowlands in New Jersey, PLANT was asked to develop a conceptual master plan for a 20,000-acre area across the Hudson River from Manhattan known as the Hackensack Meadows, a site that is crisscrossed by three municipalities and seven towns. The Meadowlands is a place to drive through on the way to New York or to the Ikea in New Jersey–not a place that inspires change and opportunity. Containing early examples of industrial occupation, parts of the site used to be oak forest, while other areas continue to remain difficult marshlands where consecutive attempts by both the Dutch and the US Army Corps of Engineers failed to dominate the landscape and build upon a difficult terrain. Through the development of several kinds of maps to analyze the rivers, bridges and industrial artifacts, PLANT developed conceptual models to see how the various spaces could be developed, and this process could be of significant inspiration to other designers who wish to work on such a large scale.
Another case study presented by PLANT included the Mtis Gardens project of 1999, which provided an exploration into the many aspects of contemporary garden-making. By walking through the site, the designers came across four mature Quaking aspen and decided to use them as an anchor point for their design concept. The synthesis behind their project involved creating a St. Lawrence landscape that allows visitors to discover the site in a state of repose. A chaise longue, domestic gardens, a bench made of stones collected on the shoreline, fabric screening and a large dividing element constructed of wood and loose straw together create a collage that introduces furniture as a physical manifestation of the landscape, and furthers the discussion surrounding the relationship of inhabitation.
But not every practitioner presented fresh insights into contemporary practice. One of the early disappointments during the session was architect James Cutler. Cutler started his practice in 1977 and as Bainbridge Island grew in population, so did the size and nature of the residences, as dot-com millionaires began populating this once idyllic Pacific Northwest enclave. Admitting that it is difficult to remain a steadfast tree-hugger while practicing as an architect, Cutler was determined to hang on to his vision of treading softly on the earth. But as the complexity of his commissions grew, he realized that he was part of the very machine that is the enemy of nature, and managed to come to terms with the fact that he was helping to destroy the very landscape that he set out to protect. When he was given the commission to design a 55,000-square-foot home for Bill Gates, Cutler believed that the project would provide him with a high-profile soapbox from which to espouse the ethics of designing sustainable architecture. On a somewhat positive note, the amount of old-growth timber required to construct the house necessitated the initiation of a sawmill designed specifically for the ongoing reclamation of old timber in the Pacific Northwest. Raising the issue of environmental sustainability for such a large home is not without its ethical dilemmas.
Although it is possible to appreciate other houses designed by Cutler, such at the Paulk Residence in Seabeck, Washington (1994) or the Long Residence on Orcas Island (2003), these projects are largely conventional homes befitting a special cadre of American elites who enjoy employing vast amounts of natural material in order to create lavish woodsy enclaves in old-growth forests and other environmentally sensitive areas. Cutler’s drawings are beautiful, often produced on vellum and shown with an old-fashioned slide projector, but nowhere do we see any advanced engineering that models energy-efficiency strategies. The projects merely exude that feel-good effect of using lots of wood. Cutler’s work may have been convincing to a professional audience 10 to 15 years ago, but in today’s world, these environmental mantras no longer seem relevant.
The work of Marlon Blackwell was also highly reflective of a desire to engage the dynamics of the region in which he works. The true value of Blackwell’s architecture is that it is born out of a goal of enriching the experience of the everyday. Blackwell’s approach is both fresh and dignified in that it seeks to engage the client in the process of making successful architecture that is tactile and responsive. Ranging from office buildings to single-family residences, Blackwell’s work empowers a local spirit and avoids any pretense of an architectural style. An excellent storyteller and a plain-spoken Southerner, he makes simple buildings elegant–an approach to practice that is both very straightforward yet difficult to emulate.
From an interest in the peculiarity of place, we turn to an architectural process that revels in producing facile and nearly unbuildable forms applied through socially dubious methods. In a delightfully arrogant and well-spoken manner, Alex Pincus was a credible, if not refreshing representative for Hani Rashid from the New York office of Asymptote. Armed with a recently acquired Master of Architecture degree from the paperless architecture school at Columbia–not to mention some professional initi
ation of obscure parlance from his former employer Peter Eisenman–Pincus was on message espousing Asymptote’s party line. Working at various scales, Asymptote produces investigations that range from products to skyscrapers, as well as attempting to engage in urban design. Somehow all the scales seem to share a common theme that is richly rhetorical while fetishizing the aspects of empty formalism.
In 2002, Asymptote completed their Hydra Pier near Haarlemmeer, Holland which is their most successful built work. Containing very little program, the project was ostensibly intended to be an iconic building for a flower festival. Situated on reclaimed land near the Schiphol airport, the design process began with looking at the history of Holland when much of its land was under water 150 years ago. Therefore, Asymptote conducted a variety of formal studies looking at hydrodynamics and aircraft design. The fluid and undefined roof plane acknowledges the planar and artificial Dutch landscape while a triptych of curved glass wraps itself around the building opening to the landscape beyond. Pincus speaks of an ill-conceived irony that attempts to frame a landscape through the pavilion’s windows–ascribed to a Dutch landscape painting that is impossible to engage. This hint of irony is neither particularly interesting, nor effective. Framing a landscape through a window where one cannot directly engage the site is no more ironic than stating that a goldfish who swims in a fishbowl cannot engage the environment of the room in which the fishbowl is located.
And as far as operating within a fishbowl, it is puzzling how Asymptote managed to secure a commission to provide a master plan for Georgetown, an old historic colonial town located in Penang, Malaysia. The entire area has around 400,000 inhabitants, half of which occupy an historic centre comprised of Chinese shophouses and a sensitive urban fabric. If one were to actually visit Georgetown, one would be surprised to hear how Asymptote intends to develop a master plan that sets out to negate the town’s post-colonial expansion through the concept of “rails as building envelopes emanating from the hillside as fingers into the city.” With the intention to develop residences, offices, cultural and institutional buildings set against a park and road system, there appears to be no strategic planning behind the intended implementation of hotels, condos, a philharmonic hall, schools, sports arenas, public greens and medical facilities. Beyond naming just about every building type imaginable, Asymptote intends to develop indiscrete buildings that “conform to a three-dimensional blanketing of the site producing an undulation throughout the site and creating an envelope strategy for development.” Aren’t all buildings three-dimensional? In Asymptote’s fascination with form and virtual reality, urban design remains an afterthought that is questionable with respect to the existing social fabric and cultural sensibility of place.
And finally, it is Asymptote’s proposal for the Guadalajara Guggenheim that is the most spectacular example of the firm’s desire to produce an architecture of fantasy. As finalists for the museum competition, the project is not so much an icon, but a hybrid between the “organic and the machine.” The whole building is held together by a parametric structural system whose elements redefine their shape and connections intuitively based on a whimsical digital model sprung from a “megaplinth of culture.” As his night rendering illustrates, the virtual and real come together where Pincus closed by stating, “the spectacle and hybrid of the confluence of digital and real that makes Asymptote the undefined and unclear firm that we are at the moment.”
As a young practitioner with a sense of invention and delight, Thomas Heatherwick was truly a breath of fresh air. Heatherwick founded his firm in 1994, but it was the London Fashion Week installation at the Harvey Nichols department store in 1997 that first brought him attention. The project involved weaving a 200-metre-long structure through the department store’s 12 windows along its faade. Today, Heatherwick Studio comprises an office of 25 people, which include architects, landscape architects, product designers and engineers.
Heatherwick’s manner of speaking about particular design approaches is tinged with a sense of wonder and invention as exemplified by his Rolling Bridge, located on the Paddington Basin in London, perhaps his most published project to date. Another magical project is the “B of the Bang” sculpture completed in Manchester in 2004. At 56 metres in height, it is the UK’s tallest structure. Next to the stadium built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games, the sculpture forms a gateway to the stadium, and is constructed from 180 tapered steel spikes connected at a central point 22 metres above the ground. The structure is supported by five of the spikes that extend more than 20 metres below ground.
On an urban design level, Heatherwick’s scheme for Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district provides an elegant solution for a diverse range of recreational activities. It consists of three significant elements: a series of elevated basketball courts, a hard edge containing night markets and opportunities for sports activities, and finally a reconfigured soccer field that is lowered by 1.6 metres below grade and designed with stepped seating around the perimeter.
Working at a variety of scales–from designing handbags to urban design schemes–one of Heatherwick Studio’s interests lies in product and industrial design research. This has yielded projects like the 30-metre-tall glass bead structure for the Wellcome Trust in London, or the crinkled stainless steel modular panels made rigid with the spraying of CFC-free insulating foam on the back. The panels are to be used on Heatherwick’s Aberystwyth Business Units in Wales, a commission which was secured through a competition to design 20 business units and accompanying multipurpose space for Wales’ largest arts centre. Construction is due to begin in the summer of 2006.
In a very poignant manner, the Banff Session closed with Afghan-American artist Lida Abdul delivering a thought-provoking presentation relating her interpretations of life near Kabul and in Los Angeles. Abdul provided a glimpse of some of the issues that our profession will increasingly find itself addressing in the years to come, notably how to contend with populations living in a global diaspora as well as the responsibility of Western culture and Western cities to connect with what is happening beyond our borders. Her work included videos of her carrying around an idealized vision of inhabitation–a little girl’s dollhouse–throughout the neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. Her main body of work focused on the destruction of houses and villages in Afghanistan and how this destruction had inspired her to seek some means of healing by covering ruins of homes in white paint. The paint represents hope, memorialization and healing. Architects could do well by beginning to understand how we can design through modest means and spiritual depth for a world that is placing increasingly greater demands on the design community to respond to the complexities of our global cultures. Although based in a theoretical context, Abdul is a critically engaged artist who has lived as an Afghan refugee and continues to be in contact with many other Afghan refugees who consider “architecture as a place of hiding, as refuge, as target.” Abdul remarked to me in conversation that she just wanted to give a different perspective on what is going on in today’s global reality, and to perhaps inspire some architects to think of these informal and weak places as well as the many fragile socio-political situations that our world must face.
As Fisher articulated in his desire to bring together the many presenters over the course of the three-day conference, the issue of landscape was a common thread. Blackwell and Cutler exemplified a cultural landscape while PLANT emphasized the natural landscape. Practitioners like Pincus reside in the virtual landscape, while Heatherwick believes in innovation and discovery largely in the urban landscape. At one point, Fisher asked Pincus to defend rather than define his position on buildings that do not consider a sense of place. Pincus merely responded that, “place is a completely constructed concept and the world as we see it is constructed by our own minds. Architecture is by its very nature, alien environments.” Thankfully, most architects would disagree. As the 2006 Banff Session indicated, our world is a very dynamic place that, according to Heatherwick, is full of “particularities.” We should all be so lucky to design in a world full of diverse opportuities and futures.
Arrests at GOP Convention Are Criticized
Via The Washington Post, written by By Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia
NEW YORK -- One late August evening, Alexander Pincus pedaled his bicycle to the Second Avenue Deli to buy matzo ball soup, a pastrami-on-rye and potato latkes for his sweetheart, who was sick with a cold.
He would not return for 28 hours. As Pincus and a friend left the deli, they inadvertently walked into a police blockade and sweep of bicycle-riding protesters two days before the Republican National Convention began. "I asked an officer how I could get home," Pincus recalled. "He said, 'Follow me,' and we went a few feet and cops grabbed us. They handcuffed us and made us kneel for an hour."
Police carted Pincus to a holding cell topped with razor wire and held him for 25 hours without access to a lawyer. The floor was a soup of oil and soot, he said, and the cell had so few portable toilets that some people relieved themselves in the corner. Pincus said a shoulder was dislocated as police pulled back his arms to handcuff him. "Cops kept saying to us, 'This is what you get for protesting,' " said Pincus, whose account of his arrest is supported in part by deli workers and a time-stamped food receipt.
Pincus was one of 1,821 people arrested in police sweeps before and during the Republican convention, the largest number of arrests associated with any American major-party convention. At the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, which unlike New York's was marked by widespread police brutality, cops made fewer than 700 arrests.
In the days after the convention, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly stated that "every NYPD officer did a great job." But interviews with state court officials, City Council representatives, prosecutors, protesters and civil libertarians -- and a review of videos of demonstrations -- point to many problems with the police performance. Officers often sealed off streets with orange netting and used motor scooters and horses to sweep up hundreds of protesters at a time, including many who appear to have broken no laws. In two cases, police commanders appeared to allow marches to proceed, only to order many arrests minutes later.
Most of those arrested were held for more than two days without being arraigned, which a state Supreme Court judge ruled was a violation of legal guidelines. Defense attorneys predict a flood of civil lawsuits once protesters have settled the misdemeanor charges lodged against them.
"The overriding problem during the convention was the indiscriminate arrests . . . of people who did nothing wrong," Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said at a City Council hearing last week. "They were arrested because they were . . . participating in a lawful demonstration."
Police officials declined to talk about these problems last week, citing a pending court case. But the city's criminal justice coordinator, John Feinblatt, said in an interview that city lawyers tried to weed out the unjustly arrested and that the volume of arrests -- more than 1,100 on one day -- overwhelmed the police department. More broadly, Bloomberg and Kelly defended the vast majority of the arrests as justified and described holding cells as clean and humane.
Bloomberg, in interviews during convention week, said that protesters expected prisons to look like "Club Med." Kelly said police encountered other delays as they tried to find separate cells for a large number of female detainees.
The first mass arrests came three days before the Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 convention, when police swooped down on Critical Mass, a loosely knit collective of bicyclists who periodically flood city streets and slow traffic. Police usually tolerate the disruption, but that night officers arrested more than 200. Kelly told New York magazine that he wanted to send protesters a message.
The next few days were quiet, and a quarter-million-strong march went forward Aug. 29 without incident.
But the mood changed Aug. 31, when police made 1,128 arrests. Anarchists had pledged a day of resistance, blocking traffic. Police arrested hundreds, and civil liberties lawyers on the scene described most arrests as lawful.
But farther downtown on the same day, the War Resisters League, a decades-old pacifist group, was readying a peaceful march from Ground Zero to Madison Square Garden, where it intended to conduct a civil disobedience "die in."
A video provided by the New York Civil Liberties Union shows police commanders laying out the ground rules: As long as protesters did not block traffic, they would not get arrested during the walk north. (No permit is required for a march on a sidewalk as long as protesters leave space for other pedestrians to pass.) Within a block or two, however, the video shows marchers lined up on the sidewalk, far from an intersection, as a police officer announces on a bullhorn: "You're under arrest."
"They came with batons, bicycles, they came with netting," said the Rev. G. Simon Harak, a Jesuit priest. "The kind of forces you expect to be turned on terrorists was unleashed on us."
Police arrested 200 people, saying they had blocked the sidewalk.
About the same time Tuesday, several other groups of protesters started walking two abreast from Union Square, the city's historic protest soapbox, to Madison Square Garden. However, several demonstrators say -- and photographs show -- that police soon stopped them, asked them to raise their hands and arrested them.
Throughout the week, police also picked up dozens of people who appeared to have nothing to do with demonstrations, the New York Civil Liberties Union said. Among those swept up by police were several newspaper reporters, two women shopping at the Gap, a feeder company executive out for dinner with a friend, and Wendy Stefanelli, a costume designer with the TV show "Sex and the City," who was walking to get a drink with a friend.
She saw a police officer pushing a demonstrator against a wall and asked him to lay off. Police flooded the street, and she was arrested. "I don't know how this could happen," Stefanelli, 35, told the City Council last week. "I was coming from work."
Bloomberg has acknowledged that police may have arrested some innocent bystanders, but he suggested that it was partly their fault.
"If you go to where people are protesting and don't want to be part of the protest, you're always going to run the risk that maybe you'll get tied up with it," he said on a weekly radio show on WABC.
Police hauled those arrested to newly built holding cells in a former bus depot on the Hudson River. In interviews, two dozen protesters from six states described floors covered in oil and officers who denied access to family and lawyers.
During this time, Deputy Police Commissioner Paul J. Browne twice stated to The Washington Post that most protesters had been released after six or seven hours. Only on Thursday, the last day of the convention, did he acknowledge the much longer delays.
Last Friday, Feinblatt, the city's criminal justice coordinator, attributed the problems to a glut of arrests. Other city officials have spoken of state delays in processing fingerprints.
But senior police officials had said for months that they anticipated 1,000 arrests a day during the convention. Citing such warnings, state court officials, prosecutors and Legal Aid lawyers doubled staffing and opened extra courtrooms during convention week.
"What happened for several days is that we had resources available and we simply were not getting the bodies produced, the defendants in the courtroom," said David Bookstaver, spokesman for the state office of court administration.
State officials also released figures showing that they had processed 94 percent of all fingerprints within one hour.
The backlog created a legal crisis for the city. State Supreme Court Judge John Cataldo held officials in contempt of court. "These people," Cataldo said of those arrested, "have already been victims of the process."
His order resulted in the release of almost 500 people. Tricia Schriefer of Milwaukee had spent two days trying to find her daughter, Claire, 19, a college student who had been arrested Aug. 31. Tricia Schriefer called the police and city offices, only to be told that her daughter was in a legal twilight.
Her daughter was finally released -- without charges -- after Cataldo issued his ruling. "To be held for 50 hours and not be charged . . . it's pretty outrageous," Schriefer said. "It's just counter to everything I had understood about our legal process."
Since the convention ended, protesters have flocked daily into Manhattan Criminal Court, where most of them are accepting misdemeanors and violations -- charges that would typically carry no jail term. The difference between them and someone caught double-parking is that the protesters already had spent two days in jail.
"Too many New Yorkers were willing to look away," said Norman Siegal, a civil liberties lawyer who is representing Pincus. "We don't lose our rights overnight with a big bang; we lose them incrementally over time."
Convention Detention
Via The Village Voice, written by Tom Robbins:
Among those Mayor Bloomberg would have "just plead guilty" to arrest charges stemming from the Republican National Convention is Alex Pincus, 28, who spent 27 hours in jail and suffered a dislocated shoulder—all while trying to get chicken soup for his ailing girlfriend.
A graduate student in architecture at Columbia University, Pincus and a friend rode their bikes over to the Second Avenue Deli at the corner of East 10th Street on Friday evening, August 27. In addition to the soup, they bought corned beef and pastrami sandwiches, latkes, and soda. As they were waiting, they saw that the block had filled with bicyclists. These, they later learned, were some of the 5,000 people who had taken part in the Critical Mass ride, pedaling through Manhattan streets shouting anti-Bush slogans. When Pincus and his pal, Isa Wipfli, 29, went to retrieve their own bikes, they found that police had cordoned off the block at both ends. Pincus approached a nearby officer. "I said, 'Hi. We're just here buying dinner. We're not involved. How do we get out of here?' " Pincus said the cop led them down the street and then called two other police officers over, and shouted, "These guys!"
Pincus and Wipfli were immediately seized. "We tried to show them the bags of food and the receipt. We said, 'Look, it's still warm.' They wouldn't listen." One officer took Wipfli's bag and looked inside. "He said, 'Mmm, sandwiches. Looks good,' " said Pincus. What Pincus was more worried about was his chronically ailing shoulder as cops pulled his arms back and placed him in plastic flex-cuffs. "I tried to tell them I can't put it in that position, that it will dislocate. Instead, they pulled my shoulder out of its socket. The pain was tremendous."
Taken to the improvised holding pens at Pier 57 on the West Side, Pincus pleaded with police to at least let him be cuffed in front to ease the pain. "I must've tried to explain to 10 different people until they finally took me to see a nurse. She didn't know what to do, so they took me to St. Vincent's Hospital." On the way there, an apologetic officer told him that under normal circumstances, Pincus would be out of jail already. "He said usually I'd be released within two, three hours. But they had decided to hold people overnight to keep them off the streets so that they'd get the message and not do it again."
On Sunday, Bloomberg insisted that there is not "one shred of evidence" that protesters were kept locked up longer than usual. But he has blocked all efforts to find out. Last week his administration boycotted a hearing of the Committee on Governmental Operations called by Deputy City Council Majority Leader Bill Perkins, who was trying to get some answers about city arrest and detention policies during the protests. Perkins has vowed to issue subpoenas to city officials to compel their appearance, but no subpoena has been issued yet. Perkins said Council Speaker Gifford Miller is personally trying to reach an agreement with the administration to have officials appear before another hearing to be held in early October.
Just how Michael Bloomberg has handled the civil-liberties issues stemming from the convention—his refusal to allow an anti-war rally in Central Park and the controversies surrounding police treatment of protesters—would seem to be a likely issue for those eager to seek his job next year. But the top contenders have been mostly silent on the issue.
Miller, who has raised $3.3 million for a potential citywide race next year, is pushing the mayor to send representatives to the next hearing, aides said. But the council speaker declined to be interviewed about his own views on the subject of how the city handled the convention arrests.
He wasn't the only one ducking the issue. Comptroller William Thompson, another would-be Democratic mayoral contender, also begged off, citing the (largely administrative) role his office plays in overseeing legal claims against the city that will arise from the arrests.
In response to Voice questions, Manhattan borough president C. Virginia Fields, another mayoral wannabe, said she was disappointed in the city's performance. "We all knew, almost a year in advance, that hundreds of thousands of protesters were coming to New York," she said. "We all made the assumption that this is what the police department and city were preparing to address—not violating civil liberties or keeping people locked up for more than 24 hours without being arraigned."
"Detaining people for over 24 hours for the equivalent of a parking ticket is way over the top," former Bronx borough president Freddy Ferrer, a likely candidate in 2005, told the Voice. "The council is appropriately holding hearings, and the administration should appropriately answer questions. [Police commissioner] Ray Kelly is a good guy, but that doesn't give him immunity from answering in public."
Actually, as Perkins and several witnesses at the hearing pointed out, it's not that the mayor and Kelly aren't talking about the convention arrests; they're just picking their spots.
The two men authored a joint New York Post op-ed piece on September 10 hailing their own performance as a success, and insisting that Pier 57—where protesters said they were forced to lie down on oil-coated, rash-producing floors—"was run in a humane fashion and was well-equipped." Delays in processing arrestees had occurred, they wrote, "but not before nearly 1,200 protesters decided to break the law" on August 31 during a day of multiple demonstrations. Because of that upswell, "it shouldn't come as a surprise that waiting time [for release] may exceed the norm."
At the hearing, however, lawyers from the New York Civil Liberties Union produced a videotape of one mass arrest indicating that many of those jailed that day had not actually participated in civil disobedience. The tape showed police officials arresting more than 100 people who were peacefully walking near ground zero, heeding police orders to not block the sidewalk.
Kelly also told New York magazine's Robert Kolker that the Friday night arrests at which Pincus and his friend were picked up were part of a purposeful get-tough strategy. "Kelly admits now that he was sending a message," Kolker wrote. " 'It was clear,' [Kelly] says, 'that if they succeeded on Friday night, you were going to see a lot more of this when the convention kicked in.' "
If that was the direction that top police commanders issued to their troops, then it's little wonder that soup-and-sandwich-buying bystanders like Pincus and Wipfli got swept up in the nets. Last Friday, Pincus, wearing a suit and tie, showed up in Manhattan criminal court, where he pled not guilty to two counts of disorderly conduct and one count of parading without a permit, all violations punishable by up to 15 days in jail.
"I think Bloomberg and Kelly thought there would be a lot of praise for keeping the city quiet," said civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel, who, along with Earl Ward, represented Pincus. "They'd floated the idea there was going to be all this violence, and they kept saying, 'We're prepared. Citizens can go about their business.' Well, what about this citizen?"
THE REPUBLICANS: THE CONVENTION IN NEW YORK -- THE POLICE; With Restraint and New Tactics, March Is Kept Orderly
Via The New York Times, written by Michael Slackman and Al Baker:
Plainclothes police officers on stylish Italian motorscooters herded bicycle-riding demonstrators into thick orange nets stretched across intersections. Airborne spy cameras on blimps and helicopters monitored the crowd. Digital video cameras were used to tape arrest scenes and collect evidence for later use in court. A military-inspired sound device was ready to disperse crowds with shouted orders or painful blasts of noise.
After more than a year of planning and training, the New York Police Department oversaw yesterday's giant protest march by combining traditional methods of crowd control -- from undercover officers who infiltrated the crowd to a huge show of force -- with a variety of new techniques that clearly took some of the protesters by surprise.
The combined methods appeared effective at keeping yesterday's marchers where the police wanted them to be, and even protest advocates praised the police for their overall restraint, noting in particular that individual officers did not allow themselves to be provoked by the very few attempts to incite them.
When one protester threw what looked like feces at a row of young police officers on Seventh Avenue outside Madison Square Garden, they stood frozen and did not flinch, even to wipe away what turned out to be pieces of cardboard. When a group of protesters climbed atop some construction scaffolding, officers coaxed them down, then let them leave without arrest.
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This was part of the strategy that is beginning to define one of the greatest tests the Police Department has seen in recent years, not only dealing with successive days of protests, but doing so as journalists from all over the world are watching. Officers were drilled on teamwork, trained to respond to a supervisor's orders and never to react to a simple taunt.
When officers were ordered to make arrests, they acted quickly with precision, taking more than 200 people into custody yesterday, though at times over the weekend they moved so quickly that, it appears, they also swept up innocent bystanders who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Even some of the Police Department's most persistent critics reluctantly gave the police good marks, though several said most of the credit for good behavior belonged to the demonstrators.
''A quarter of a million people made a commitment to a peaceful legal march,'' said one of yesterday's marchers, Ronald Kuby, the civil rights lawyer from New York who gave his own unofficial estimate of the crowd size. ''They were the ones who kept the peace. They were the ones who were well behaved. So this notion that the police did a good job is true only to the extent that the demonstrators themselves had a powerful commitment to keep this demonstration peaceful and legal.''
The greatest show of force came at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 34th Street, where the march turned east after moving uptown. On one corner more than a dozen officers sat on horseback, while dozens of other uniformed officers lined the streets. Motorcycles, scooters and vans filled the pavement just beyond the border of the protest zone.
A few yards away, at around 3 p.m., a fire broke out when a papier-mâché float made to look like a dragon was set ablaze. The police quickly blocked off the route at 34th Street and Avenue of the Americas and put the flames out with fire extinguishers. Several people were arrested, one of whom was charged with arson.
For all the preparations to deal with the crowd, it appeared that the police forgot at least one essential detail -- water for the officers who were weighed down with body armor and riot helmets. Officers had to rely on their supervisors to run into local convenience stores to buy water.
Still, over and over, as hundreds of thousands of people marched yesterday, up Seventh Avenue, across 34th Street and down Fifth Avenue, the police showed restraint, turning away, for example, when they were mocked for failing to secure a desired raise from the city. At one point, a large group of demonstrators surrounded a patrol car, waving anarchist flags and taunting the two officers inside. The police officers hit their siren, backed up and drove off. A few uniformed officers arrived and ordered the protesters onto the sidewalks, and the group just melted away.
There were red lines, however, and anyone on a bicycle seemed to be on the wrong side of that line. At a large bike protest on Friday, the police showed they were resolved to keep the bikes from blocking traffic, and they did that again yesterday. Bicycle-riding protesters said that the people in civilian clothing (who they assumed to be police) would ride into the pack of cyclists to slow them down. Protesters said the police strategy seemed to be contain, surge and arrest.
One incident involved a group of cyclists a few blocks away from the parade route. Chris Habib, 29, said police scooters sought to move the cyclists off the street by nudging their tires. He said that as the cyclists reached Seventh Avenue traveling west on 37th Street, they slowed, facing a dilemma. Police blocked any turn south and, the bikers believed that turning north on the southbound avenue would result in instant arrest.
Several bystanders said the police arrested people who were not protesting but happened to be in the area when the police swooped down.
At the Second Avenue Deli, Alexander Pincus, 28, and Isa Wipfli, 29, had just picked up a dinner of matzo ball soup, pirogi, pastrami and corned beef for Mr. Pincus's girlfriend when they stepped outside and saw swarms of police officers and bicyclists. Mr. Pincus said he and Mr. Wipfli approached a police officer looking for a way out.
''They took our bikes and handcuffed us,'' Mr. Wipfli said. ''We were like, 'Look at the food. It's still warm.' They wouldn't listen to anything we said.''