Occupying Wall Street, December 17, 2011

“Occupying Wall Street, December 17, 2011” Ellen and Bill Schaap and their dog Bambu. Ellen and Bill lived in Greenwich Village. Bill was a lawyer and co-founder of the CovertAction Information Bulletin and director of the Institute for Media Analysis. The seventeenth of each month marked a monthly anniversary of the protest. It was customary to denote the date with the first letter of the month followed by the number seventeen, this day was D17. The protest was in a small triangular island of a park known as Duarte Park close to 6th Avenue and Canal Street. It is owned by the vestry of Trinity Church a member of the Episcopal Church of New York City. The Trinity Church vestry has a real estate portfolio valued in the billions of dollars and a very small church membership. The vestries are run by lay members of the church and in the case of Trinity Church consists solely of wealthy financiers. After the protesters had used the park as a new base for a period of a few weeks the vestry forced them to leave.