Protesters clash with police today during the one year anniversary of OWS.

God how time flies. Just 365 days ago, we hadn't even heard of Occupy Wall Street, horizontal democracy, or a Statement of Autonomy. It was a heady time, when we remained blissfully ignorant of what the 99% referred to, and never thought to question who owned Zucotti Park.

This weekend, preparations began in earnest for OWS's one year anniversary. It's almost like the party didn't take a six month sabbatical where it dropped off the face of front page news. Luckily, it doesn't take much to make the media wax nostalgic for the days before the tents went up, and even though today's planned activities sound a lot like a peaceful version of that scene in The Dark Knight Rises, there is definitely excitement in the air. Below, we follow the OWS news of the day, as it happens. If you have any tips, photos or footage that you want seen, send them our way.

3:25 p.m.: Protesters and police clash in Zuccotti Park: OWS had their barricades taken away, and several seemingly handicapped Occupiers are arrested and loaded--along with their wheelchairs--into police vans. Behind the World Financial Center, a Debt March began but didn't draw a huge crowd.
1:12 p.m.: An arrested protester LiveStreams from his holding cell (audio only):

Live video for mobile from Ustream

12:58 p.m.: The Wall Street Journal is claiming over 124 protestershave been arrested since this morning. Meanwhile, photos emerge as NYPD move to Zuccotti:

Via Jay Densen

Via Nick Pinto

Via Federal Flashes

Via Alexa O'Brien

10:48 a.m.:

According to New York Magazine, at least 10 "leaders" of the leaderless movement were arrested yesterday during a tame reoccupation of Zuccotti Park. (This is interesting only so far as the fact that there are leaders, this time around.) While the music lasted well past bedtime on Sunday, several members worried that the NYPD was targeting key members to prevent today's "roving carnival" from happening, especially since the 18 arrested over the course of the night were picked "seemingly at random. Meanwhile...discussions! Planning committees, how we've missed you! Jimmy McMillian...what the hell were you doing there?
http://youtu.be/1qXiY8s4gCg
Not to mention a concert that included Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, as well as a Rosh Hashanah service.
http://youtu.be/Sa_wLovfn28
Currently: The People's Wall protest at the Stock Exchange has been hindered by police presence, herding activists onto the sidewalk and making sure the several small factions planning to join up at the Stock Exchange never met up.
http://youtu.be/GgJ5f9ZqOFc
Guards were checking I.D.s at the entrance of the NYSE and employees were alerted to the beefed up security. Meaning that you aren't paranoid...the NYPD just got a copy of your schedule. It should look something like this:

MON. SEPT 17: RESISTANCE Financial District
On the one year anniversary, people from all walks of life are going to assemble in the streets of the Financial District in an outcry for economic justice. For on-the-ground updates please contact the OWS PR Team directly.

7am – The People’s Wall, a non-violent civil disobedience at the Stock Exchange.* + 99 Revolutions: a swirl of mobile intersection occupations throughout the Financial District which will spring from the People's Wall Action. (Final tipsheet will be out Sunday regarding Monday’s protest and meeting locations)
10am – Storm Wall Street, an ecologically themed convergence for a sustainable future (Bowling Green)
12-2pm – The 99% Return to Wall Street, this assembly will bring together Union workers and leadership, economics experts, faith, community members, students and occupiers to let our voices be heard once more at (Liberty Square/Zuccotti Park)
6-8pm – Popular Assembly (Foley Square)

As expected, Twitter has been the go-to point for breaking news: according to several eye-witness accounts, the police have been arresting protesters at random. (Of course, now that we know that tweeting about OWS might be used against you in a court of law, people may be exercising some restraint when reporting on the police. Hopefully not.) The livestream is also back, so you can follow along at home.

Live video for mobile from Ustream

Seems appropriate.

Occupy Wall Street grows more inventive with each new protest action and the movement's latest tactic may be well-suited to many who have, until now, followed events passively via the Internet: protesters are sacked out tonight on sidewalks  not far from the New York Stock Exchange. What's more, the concrete naps of the disaffected may have more legal protection than a tent in Zuccotti Park:

Attorney Gideon Orion Oliver says protesters are protected from arrest by a 2000 court decision that allows sleeping on sidewalks to express political views.

A spokesperson told the Associated Press that the action is already several days old.

The Sleep-out isn't actually a brand-new tactic; various Occupy movements were holding solidarity sleep-outs for the homeless in late 2011.

It does appear peaceful protest can't get much more peaceful.

Mr. Green’s peers recognize it, too, and that’s why the Cushman & Wakefield executive director has been named this year’s Real Estate Board of New York “Young Real Estate Man of the Year” recipient.

David E. Green. (Illustration by Joao Maio Pinto)

Last year, The Commercial Observer profiled the 25-year real estate veteran’s success with turning around the arguably staid 2 Park Avenue, which once boasted blue-chip clients like the Hartford insurance company and Newsday during the 1980s, but had since seen its more prestigious clients flee to other submarkets—or out of the city altogether.

Mr. Green, 47, was able to spin the Midtown Art Deco building into a hip property once again by expanding the lease of Internet company Gilt Groupe and moving its offices into a 100,000-square-foot space. The online retailer, which offers customers limited discounts on upscale fashion brands, had already subleased space from Yahoo. But when Hartford chose to pull up stakes last fall, it made the bigger commitment—with Mr. Green’s help, of course—to expand its presence in the building.

“They felt that in the last few years the building had started to redevelop,” he told The Commercial Observer last month. “The area had become more cool, more hip. They felt they were part of that.”

Gilt Groupe’s presence in the landmark building, meanwhile, helped lure designer handbag company Kate Spade to a 95,000-square-foot space inside the property, further boosting its cred as a cool place to work.

Not only did he give shelter to some of the city’s youngest and most creative companies this year, he also renewed several major leases among the city’s most coveted pool of white-shoe law firms.

In March, he assisted Lazard Frères in its renewal of a 21-year lease in its 400,000-square-foot office space at 30 Rockefeller Center, tethering one of the city’s top boutique financial firms to Midtown.

Mr. Green’s quarter-of-a-century-plus experience as a power broker for top city landlords like Harry Macklowe, Vornado Realty and Equitable Real Estate Investment Management has also made him the go-to agent for Wall Street titans like Morgan Stanley and CWCapital.

A capstone of his career, to give just one example of his prowess on Wall Street, was signing the New York Stock Exchange to a 350,000-square-foot lease renewal at 20 Broad Street in 2000.

But with the times rapidly changing, staying on top also requires focus. Indeed, a veteran like Mr. Green keeps up on the trends in the industries and the problems looming on the horizon. Clinging to modernity, Mr. Green believes, will be one of the largest challenges for Manhattan’s oldest buildings.

“The aging stock of Manhattan’s office-building inventory is a concern as tenants are increasingly looking for buildings that are technologically advanced to handle their business needs,” Mr. Green said.

New development, however, might satiate the needs of only the city’s largest commercial tenants.

“While future development on the West Side and other areas of Manhattan is starting to happen, it’s on a very large scale,” he said. “Smaller tenants will have more limited choices to satisfy those needs than larger tenants.”

Staying competitive is among Mr. Green’s specialties. But it’s his charitable work that he finds most rewarding and what prompted the Young Men’s/Women’s Real Estate Association of New York to honor him this year with its award, which is given in coordination with the REBNY accolades.

Indeed, for the past five years he has cochaired the association’s annual summer golf and tennis outing at Old Oaks Country Club in Westchester.

Mr. Green, who played tennis at Oyster Bay High School, led the organization’s fund-raising efforts, which were spearheaded by members last year to feed the city’s needy during Thanksgiving.

Thanks to the YM/WREA’s Feed the Less Fortunate program, in coordination with the charitable group RiverFundNY and local catering house iEat Green, 2,000 people over the past five years have received a hot home-cooked meal during the holidays.

The group spends the weekend prior to Thanksgiving cooking 50 turkeys, 200 pounds each of sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, stuffing and string beans.

They then serve the homeless at Rufus King State Park a few days before the holiday.

“It’s an incredibly rewarding experience,” Mr. Green said. “You get so much joy out of the whole thing.”
Given all this, it’s no surprise the organization chose to bestow Mr. Green with one of its top honors.

“Any time you are recognized by your peers for doing good it makes you feel good,” said Mr. Green, a Long Island native and SUNY Binghamton economics graduate who currently lives in Old Bethpage with his wife, Rhonda, and two children, Leah, 17, and Benjamin, 13.

“This is the pinnacle of my career,” he added, referring to the recognition. “It’s a great honor.”

Mr. Corzine has set his sights on sharing space with John Carris Investments, a full service investment banking firm whose corporate headquarters are located inside the Trump Organization-owned office tower, The Wall Street Journal reports.

40 Wall Street (Courtesy Property Shark

A spokesman for John Carris did not respond to a request for comment.

A person close to the building said they were unaware of Mr. Corzine’s plans.

“We certainly didn’t know anything about it until we saw it in the paper this morning,” said the person. “It’s not like he’s [Corzine] renting space from us,” the person added.

40 Wall Street, located near the New York Stock Exchange, has seen a flurry of leasing activity in recent weeks. NYC pharmaceutical giant Duane Reade relocated its corporate headquarters to the 72-story building, where it already has a sushi and hair-styling megastore inside the building. Music publishing company The Harry Fox Agency also moved to 40 Wall Street from its former offices at 601 W. 26th Street.

A person close to John Carris Investments said that Mr. Corzine is looking for office space, not to join the firm itself, the paper reported.

MF Global Holdings filed for bankruptcy protection last October after bets it had made on euro zone debts led the company to financial ruin.

Mr. Corzine stepped down as the chief executive of MF Global Holdings in November.

But his MF Global Holdings hangover continues. Yesterday, a group of 38,000 Montana farmers who were customers of MF Global Holdings filed a class action lawsuit against Corzine, claiming the former Goldman bigwig had used money from their accounts to pay off debts.

Who speaks for Anonymous?

Update: It looks like some members of Anonymous were able to take the  website for the New York Stock Exchange offline for approximately two minutes. No trading was affected. A compromise, or just a failed mission? Also, what about the "no hacking on a holiday" rule??

Watch out, New York Stock Exchange! You are the next target of the hacker group Anonymous, according to a YouTube video that went up October 5th. That would be the day of Occupy Wall Street's Megamarch, though the latter group has tried to distance itself from the hacktivist community.

Oh wait: Scratch that. A video appeared this weekend, from the same YouTube account as the first message, claiming that the NYSE would not be getting hacked after all...or at least not on a holiday. But now there's an even newer video, claiming that some of Anonymous is going through with the NYSE attack. Huh?

As it turns out, different factions of Anonymous are having trouble getting together on this whole "take down the entire stock market" idea.

So is Anonymous breaking up?

This whole issue stems from one YouTube account, AnonMessage, that is apparently only owned by one individual. (It gets tricky to tell how many people are involved with Anonymous accounts, since all their messages come out in the same computerized voice.)

Nevertheless, an October 7th update apologized: they were  "mistaken" to have posted the past two videos - "Operation Invade Wall Street: A Message to the Media" and "Operation Invade Wall Street: A Message to the People" - since the messages  did not come from the "official" AnonOps headquarters.

Transcript:

Hello, citizens of the world. My name is TheAnonMessage. I speak on behalf of myself and the Anonymous collective. I would like to point out a few things regarding my channel, my mission, and the two notorious videos that were posted by me almost a week ago.

My mission is very simple: To bring viewers of YouTube easy access to documents made by fellow An ons from AnonOps in a creative yet simple form of video. I am a messenger of Anonymous just as it says in my name. I aknowledge that I am NOT the messenger of the ENTIRE collective, but I represent the majority. The documents I choose to make videos out of involve several announcements of operations, new factions, and general news and information on Anonymous. Apparently, this time, I have not been entirely successful in completing my mandate, which is to bring the people of the world general news and information on Anonymous.

The last two videos up loaded "Operation Invade Wall Street: A Message to the Media" and "Operation Invade Wall Street: A Message to the People" were part of an operation formed by a group of An ons in AnonOps which was officially called hashtag operation invade wall street.

I did not support that particular message. But as a messenger, I had to address it, thinking it was justified by AnonOps.

I was mistaken.

Therefore, I would like to state my sincere apologies to anyone who was misinformed or dismayed by any of the two videos. I am sorry if any of the two videos caused any shaken trust in either me, this channel, or the Anonymous collective. I should have known the following:

-Anonymous would never tell the people to use LOIC after it has created consequences during our attacks of Operation Payback.
-Anonymous would never issue an attack on N Y S E during a holiday, as it is completely irrelevant.
-Anonymous would find it completely unnecessary to use a Distributed Denial Of Service attack on N Y S E dot com as it does not control or contribute to any stock trade or exchange of bonds within the one percent.
-Anonymous would find it plainly stupid to announce the attack 10 days before the attack takes effect. We do usual attacks quickly and swiftly.

As of now, operation invade wall street has been terminated. Many people could still proceed with attacking N Y S E. They will do it at their own risk. I do not support this because it is dangerous and a call for massive arrests. If you wish to proceed, remember to take the necessary precautions to hide yourself. If you are not an experienced hacker, do not, and I mean this, do not get involved. You will be putting yourself into trouble. Be ware. I will keep the existing two videos as they contain annotated information that will spread throughout the embedded videos.

Then yesterday another video appeared, just to clarify that there are indeed different factions of Anonymous that might have separate goals:

Transcript:

There's been some con flict, as always. Many people refuse to accept that Operation Invade Wall Street is a reality. Some say it is a COINTELPRO agent tactic to set the map for a false flag operation.

I am here to say that I am the messenger. As the messenger, I cannot take sides. I am not supporting or opposing invade wall street, and it was wrong of me to say that the operation has been terminated.

I am here to state the message.

I am here to clarify that factions of Anonymous are going with the operation. Other factions are opposing it....

I immediately follow this information with an important message. Do not use this tool if you are easily traceable, such as when using a house router or any other personal form of internet connection.

Earlier today there was a short hack on N Y S E dot com. I am not authorized to reveal any other information other than that it was down for 30 minutes in a matter of seconds.

Those who are going to be part of the attack have a message to the N Y S E: We hack you because we don't like you.

We are all Anonymous.
We are all one Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
N Y S E, expect those of us who plan to destroy you.

So essentially the AnonMessage account has been dealing with faulty information. Or possibly real information that it does not agree with, and some other Anonymous members might not agree with.

And this is what it looks like when a decentralized collective of Internet hackers start having organizational issues. Anonymous doesn't really work as a faceless entity to be feared if its members start airing their group's problems with the world.

Though on the plus side, the NYSE seems to be doing fine right now. Thank God for Columbus Day.

Mr. Steinhardt, who made his money as Wall Street's so-called most successful money manager and who now mostly focuses on his philanthropy for Jewish causes, picked up the buildings amidst widespread expectation that the Financial District's fortunes will start looking up after getting wrecked by the economic downturn.

Not that the presence of one of finance's most successful faces means the district will cease being FiDi. Mr. Steinhardt and his partner plan to turn the $17 million Trinity Place property, the ASE's one-time headquarters and complete with the old trading floor, into a retail center with a 174-room boutique hotel above it. The Thames Street property, the more expensive of the two, closing at $48 million, is set to meet a grimmer fate: the plan is to tear the building down and build a 60-story luxury condo tower.

mcoyne@observer.com

A lot feels like it's for show on the trading floor these days: The blue jackets with mesh backs recall an age of sweaty frenzy that's since been replaced by automated calm; the bits of paper, empty Splenda packets and peanut shells strewn across the floor are tiny remnants of the mountains of paper from earlier days. Instead of running around yelling at each other, most traders quietly recline in chairs. Like the blocked-off streets around Wall Street itself, the trading floor is eerily subdued and depopulated. It feels more like a weekday morning in an empty casino than the hotbed of American capitalism.

At 3:59 p.m., the football players ascended to the podium and burst into applause. To ring the closing bell—or, as it's now called, The Closing Bell®—does not actually involve ringing a bell, just pressing a button. A sustained noise between a school bell and a car alarm rang out, while the football players continued clapping. After descending from the podium, Ryan Grant, a Packers running back who had visited the NYSE when he was in high school, looked a tiny bit disappointed. "There were more people here 10 years ago!" he said.

Since 2005, when the NYSE ceased to be the financial equivalent of a public utility, few people outside of Wall Street have grasped the difference between the New York Stock Exchange as it actually is today and "the New York Stock Exchange" we think we are watching when some people in blazers rush around holding papers behind Maria Bartiromo. Take Senator Charles Schumer, who recently initiated a campaign to ensure that the new German-American company continues to have "New York Stock Exchange" in its name. Despite holding a seat on the Senate Finance Committee, Mr. Schumer recently called the NYSE "the cradle of American capitalism" and "a national treasure."

"In America," he lamentably continued, "we start each day in our Congress and in our classrooms with the Pledge of Allegiance, and we also start it with the ringing of the bell on the floor of the stock exchange."

But while Mr. Schumer gets mileage by evoking the NYSE's glory days, the reason that it is merging with the German Deutsche Boerse is because neither one actually makes a lot of money through trading stocks anymore.

"If you think of the New York Stock Exchange, you think of it trading stocks in New York and in the U.S.," said Bernard Donefer, a professor of finance at Baruch College. "That's the smallest part of its revenue."

Mr. Schumer is not the only one confused, however. At the ringing of the bell, Green Bay cornerback Charles Woodson had his own share of soaring rhetoric: "We had about 11 million viewers in the Super Bowl," he said with emotion. "But for a minute, we just controlled the world."

In fact, when he ran the closing bell last week, Charles Woodson controlled only about 27 percent of the world. That's what the New York Stock Exchange's market share of the American equities trade is today—a marked drop from the 48 percent share it had five years ago. NASDAQ, the other American stock exchange most people know, has dropped from a market share of 26 percent to 19 percent, but it still has a famous bell and a commonly known brand name.

As for the third- and fourth-largest American stock exchanges, few people outside the industry have even heard of them, probably because they are both completely automated and became exchanges less than two years ago. One is based in New Jersey and called Direct Edge ("America's newest stock exchange"), and one is based in Kansas City and called BATS. While each respectively has a 10 percent share in the U.S. equities market—and they will probably continue to grow—it's unlikely their computer warehouses will ever be the backdrop for CNBC.

When asked if Direct Edge might ever get its own bell, one equities analyst just laughed. "Maybe a virtual bell, or some kind of high-frequency bell?" he said, giggling.

To understand what happened to the NYSE we all learned about in high school, one must go back in the very distant past, all the way to 2005. Before then, for the previous 213 years, the NYSE was a member-run institution, essentially a private club whose members paid dues for the right to broker trades on the exchange.

Like a utility, it enjoyed status as a practical monopoly. As recently as 2004, some 80 percent of NYSE-listed stocks were traded on the exchange itself. That's the NYSE that Mr. Schumer is trying to "protect." But in 2005, after some high-profile proprietary-trading scandals, and a growing realization that concentrating all trading in one place was not the most efficient way to do things anymore, the S.E.C. ended the NYSE's dominance.

"These guys were basically running it to make money themselves at the expense of the overall exchange," said Charles Jones, a professor of finance at Columbia Business School. "They were doing their job as they had done it for the past 30 years—for the past 200 years, really."

When the NYSE suddenly faced competition, its very reason for existence was quickly imperiled. Unlike the NYSE, which had thousands of employees left over from its legacy days, the new guys—like BATS and Direct Edge—just needed to set up some computers; with very low overhead, it could quickly undercut the incumbents. "They're just like a little mushroom that shot up one night after a rainstorm," said Mr. Jones.

In the years that followed, the NYSE-listed stocks actually trading on the exchange itself has more than halved. For the NYSE floor traders, still trapped in the cradle of capitalism, the past five years have been grim, as lost market share was accompanied by a race to the bottom in the fees traders charge—and diminished need for humans in what increasingly became a technology business.

"As far as how we do our jobs, the market has become a lot more fragmented," said James Matthews, a broker with the Perdiue Group who has worked on the floor of the NYSE for 20 years. "There have been a lot of layoffs down here, because the margins are so thin now." 

The merger will do little to ease their predicament. Under the new combined company (as yet unnamed), the largest chunk of revenue, an estimated 37 percent, will come from trading and clearing derivatives, particularly European futures.

So what is it that we're watching on CNBC these days? It's basically an advertisement-a way for companies going public to debut themselves to millions of investors watching daytime television. The NYSE still has a thriving listing business. As Michael Wong, an equity analyst at Morningstar, put it, "To an extent, just having that floor open, that's however many free million dollars in free advertising every year."

ewitt@observer.com

(The other sign is the Dow Jones Industrial Average's personal diary, whose entries have had names this month like "Ouchie," "Quantitative Easing Might Not Be So Great After All," "Cisco Is the Worst!" and "Still Figuring Out What Quantitative Easing Means.")

But the photographic evidence? Melancholic New York Stock Exchange snapshots: There was eyes-closed forehead smacking yesterday when 178 points were lost, but also deep sighs and a young man with a yarmulke and a stunned hand over his mouth. And this guy just looks generally out of sorts.

Earlier in the month, there was a lot of concerned-looking people running around, and even one man really sprinting (though on that day that there was an up-tick).

On the plus side, the traders were graced with television personality Nick Cannon and his electric smile at a recent opening bell.

But "Observed" is in a class of its own. In this week's installment, maybe as inspired by Betty White's recent trip to the New York Stock Exchange as it is by Lady Gaga's baseball adventures, he imagines the world's most important pop star among Wall Street's finest. Click to see Mr. Blitt's beautiful stuff.