Walmart strikes out once again. (Related Companies)

The press release came in even before The Observer had seen the initial report that prompted it.

"We have not had any talks with Walmart about a location at Willets Point and we have absolutely no intention of discussing this site with them," the email statement read.

Who knew! And yet it made perfect sense, as the company has been looking for any opening imaginable in the city.

The Daily News had heard from two Queens pols that had been contacted by Walmart about potentially supporting one of the big box retailer's outlets at the recently announced Mets Mega Mall.

“They were looking at Willets Point as a possibility for a new site in New York,” said one elected official, who asked not to be named, but said he is opposed to the idea.

Another elected official, who also did not want to be named, said the company had been courting support.

Nothing new here. Walmart has been desperate to open up an outpost in the five boroughs since its efforts in 2006 were thwarted at the City Council, and starting two years ago, the big box boogeyman seriously began to ramp up those efforts, most notably trying to plant itself at the Related Company's Gateway Center development in East New York, where the company could build as-of-right.

But following gaffes here and elsewhere and the notorious bribery incident in Mexico, the efforts have grown more difficult.

Now, even Walmart's staunchest backers seem to want nothing to do with the company. For starters, Related, along with their Willets partners the Wilpons, have disavowed any involvement with the company in building a Queens outpost. The rest of their unexpected statement reads:

There have been and will be no negotiations, they are simply not a part of our plan to build an enclosed retail and entertainment destination at Willets Point, that will bring much needed jobs and economic activity to the area and lead to the development of a new neighborhood.

Those are pretty emphatic words, but they also make a good bit of sense. The rejiggered project has already drawn criticism from a number of corners, does it really need more?

What is also surprising is that the City's Economic Development Corporation, the lead agency behind the project, and the mayor's pro-business attack dog, has distanced itself from Walmart at Willets, as well. An EDC spokesman told Gothamist, "These reports are absolutely without merit. There have been no discussions between the developer and WalMart."

This is in stark contrast to the mayor's previous statements about the company, when hizzoner strongly endorsed Walmart coming here.

He still clearly holds these views even as his underlings at EDC deflect them, at least in one corner of the city. On his weekly radio show today, Mayor Bloomberg reiterated Walmart's rights to open in the five boroughs: "As long as they don’t break any laws, we should not, government, the City Council included, should not be out there criticizing because all that says is to other companies that might want to locate here, you know, ‘What do I need that aggravation for? Who knows if they turn on me?’"

The mayor went on to tick off the various causes Walmart supports, from responsible gun ownership to the United Negro College Fund. He also pointed out that numerous New Yorkers cross city lines to shop at Walmart stores in Nassau County and New Jersey—a point echoed by a Walmart spokesman in an email to The Observer: "New Yorkers went out of their way to spend more than $215 million at Walmart in 2011."

Still, if the rumors of Walmart's "stealth" entreaties to Queens pols for political backing is true, it demonstrates just how desperate the firm's situation has grown.

When the company turned up again two years ago, The Observer predicted it would attempt the same divide and conquer tactics it used to open a store in Chicago not long ago. But almost the entire political class, with the exception of the mayor, has vocally opposed Walmart. This includes every would-be mayoral candidate. It is now or never for the company, and even that may not be enough. That bouncing smiley face may never alight on our fair city.

Illustration by Zina Saunders

You can still see traces of the Occupy Wall Street encampment that once stood in Zuccotti Park—a contingent of police officers by the plaza’s entrance and an NYPD watchtower standing guard on Zuccotti’s
northern edge. However, the protesters who made this park their home before being evicted by the police last November are largely gone and the news trucks that formerly stationed themselves outside have departed in favor of a Chabad Mitzvah Tank.

On a recent afternoon at Zuccotti, The Observer encountered handful of tourists and businessmen on lunch breaks but there was nary a demonstrator in sight. At nearby Federal Hall, there were about 11 Occupiers holding signs and sitting on the steps. On the street below, workers were seemingly oblivious to the Occupiers in their midst.

“You’re a Republican?” a suited man asked his friend as they briskly passed by. “Good man!”

Seven months into the movement, the Wall Street that protesters are ostensibly trying to occupy has become inured to the spectacle of carnivalesque protests, demonstrators sleeping on sidewalks and mass arrests. And it seems the rest of the city has too. The protesters are in danger of becoming just another discordant note in the daily din that New Yorkers are so adept at tuning out, like panhandlers, street performers, sidewalk preachers and the other distractions of urban life.

“Their entire message, it’s so fragmented that no one hears it,” said Sam Padilla, the owner of a construction firm behind several developments in the financial district. “It becomes a nuisance, it’s like a gnat that you’re just trying to swat away. It’s just another element of the background noise. They want to be heard, but their message is too confusing.”

Daby Carreras, a broker with Spartan Capital, smoked a cigar a half block away from the Federal Hall Occupiers. With their many messages, Mr. Carreras said the protesters concerns just get “mixed up” and don’t grab the attention of Wall Street workers.

“The brokers are thinking about how to make more money than they did last year,” he said.

Wider public interest in the Occupy protest has also waned. Mentions of “Occupy Wall Street” in the news media are down this month by nearly 75 percent from peak in October, according to Google News. During that same period, Google searches for “Occupy Wall Street” dropped by over 80 percent nationally. The decline was even steeper in New York.

On May 1, however, Occupiers hope to jump back to the forefront of the city’s collective consciousness with a massive day of demonstrations that has been termed a “general strike.” The forecast for the day includes civil disobedience, political performance art, flash mobs and a push into Midtown.

As they move toward May Day, the protesters promise the debut of a new, decentralized model for the movement that will fuel a comeback following their eviction from the park. However, their adversaries on Wall Street aren’t the only ones who don’t seem to speak the protesters’ language.

Occupy’s planned spring reawakening is the brainchild of a secretive group of protesters who have proved markedly unfriendly to outsiders. Progressive political types and union leaders who seem like the protesters’ natural allies have had difficult experiences working with them. Even some Occupiers are complaining they’ve been left in the dark and don’t know what’s on the menu for May Day. Amid this handwringing, the insular core planning the “general strike” are more than happy to do their own thing and confident they’re going to change the world.

The May 1 Occupy comeback is currently being planned at small meetings around the city. At one of these gatherings in a Lower East Side church Sunday night, a group of about 30 Occupiers met on folding chairs and a single couch. The crowd was evenly divided between men with shaggy hair and beards and women with edgy haircuts and thick glasses. They were almost all in their 20s. A handful were members of minority groups.

A skinny man with a combination Mohawk/mullet (call it a mullhawk) and striped overalls stood at the front of the room and scrawled a list of scheduled May Day activities on a large piece of paper as they were mentioned by the group’s members. There was a panoply of protest actions planned by different Occupy-affiliated groups—including marches, “choir flash mobs,” union rallies, games of “capture the flag,” a “music dance party” and a demonstration involving “trying to levitate the Goldman sign and throwing pennies at the Federal Reserve.”

Occupy has always prided itself on being a diverse, leaderless movement, but the downside of this structure was on display at the planning meeting. Many of the attendees clearly didn’t know the details of all the events in this smorgasbord of May 1 actions.

“There’s a ‘Shit Has Got to Go’ event posted on a news site,” pointed out a man named Malcolm, who wore a sleeveless shirt, Afro and beaded necklace.

“What does that mean?” a girl asked.

“I don’t know, I just thought people would want to know about it even though it’s vague,” Malcolm said.

At one point, a man named Chris discussed plans for the aftermath of one of the main marches, which was to take protesters from Union Square to Wall Street. The ideas were rather open-ended.

“At that point, some folks from Occupy are going to ask anyone in the crowd who’s willing to, to leave to go to an evening staging area,” Chris outlined. “From there, there’ll be, like, whatever the hell we want to make it. So, some people probably want to do a march. Some people probably want to, like, go sleep out on Wall Street or something.”

In addition to these activities, people at the meeting described even vaguer protests planned for “50 to 70 targets across Midtown.”

Organizers at the strategy session said union workers would be holding “99 pickets” as part of the festivities, but they had scant details about the union element of the protests.

“Some TWU union workers are going to be like, We don’t have a contract or whatever,” Chris said when asked to give details on a transit workers’ rally.

As attendees pressed for more information about union participation, a young woman seated on the couch explained that organizers might not be able to provide more detail about the union portions of the protest because they were being planned separately.

“There’s like 40 different groups plus that are doing this and we have to get confirmation from a bunch of different bureaucracies,” she said.

Another woman with a blond chunk of hair in her otherwise brown bob was clearly unsatisfied with this explanation.

“Talking about bureaucracy in this room makes me cringe and a lot of this info should be worked out already,” she said.

The distance from organized labor was maintained partially because many Occupiers are uncomfortable with the structured nature of established progressive political groups. Because of this, May 1 marches will be facilitated by union marshals but will also include segments solely made up of Occupiers.

“There’s an Occupy Wall Street zone in the march and anyone who doesn’t feel like marching with marshals should go with the Occupy zone,” one of the organizers said at the meeting.

After about two hours of talking, the disagreements over the unknown aspects of various events seemed to have taken their toll on the group.

“Can we do a vibe check? It seems like people are getting really angry,” said a young woman with a plaintive voice. “Can we all just take a moment and take a deep breath? We all want this to be really awesome and we shouldn’t be fighting with each other.”

The meeting concluded soon after.

Despite being branded a general strike, one thing that isn’t on the menu for May 1 is a work stoppage. Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, told The Observer the Occupiers haven’t worked with the unions in “a serious way.”

“They haven’t tried to understand how you create coalitions with established elements of the progressive community,” Mr. Appelbaum said.

Despite the fact he and his union were early supporters of the Occupy movement, Mr. Appelbaum said the protesters made no attempts to communicate with organized labor.

“We’re on the same side, that’s what the Occupy movement doesn’t seem to understand,” Mr. Appelbaum said. “We’re on the same side and we should be talking to each other, not just being talked at.”

Over 20 labor groups, including Mr. Appelbaum’s RWDSU, have endorsed the Occupy protests. However, they have not called on workers to strike. Mr. Appelbaum said Occupiers should have checked with the
unions before proclaiming a strike.

“You’re not going to see workers leave their jobs in large numbers,” Mr. Appelbaum said. “That was what was called for at this time without appropriate discussion and involvement.”

A union official, who didn’t want to be named because his group is endorsing the protest, said “continuing conversations” between Occupiers and unions broke down because the diffuse, leaderless nature of the movement made it difficult to collaborate with.

“With the Occupy movement, it’s not always clear who you’re even supposed to be speaking with,” he said.

The union official also described the culture clash that occurred between labor groups and Occupiers.

“I think that, because the labor movement was established with hierarchy and the like, that it was held up to a little bit of disdain. It didn’t reflect the way the Occupy movement thought that democracy should operate, so I think that there were language barriers because of that,” the official said. “I also think that the labor movement, because it has such a hierarchical structure, has difficulty in understanding a movement without structure like that.”

Mr. Appelbaum believes Occupiers’ inability to partner with unions and other established progressive political groups shows the movement might not be able to grow beyond the cadre of young protesters who have kept the occupation alive after its eviction from the park.

“I think that in order for a movement to be successful, you have to expand beyond your core constituency and that has not happened with Occupy Wall Street,” Mr. Appelbaum said.

None of the May Day festivities planned by the Occupiers are part of the “99% Spring,” a slew of Occupy branded activities hosted by the multimillion-member progressive fund-raising organization MoveOn.org.

Justin Ruben, MoveOn’s executive director, told The Observer his group got behind the protests almost as soon as they began.

“Economic injustice and inequality had been our top priority and campaign since the beginning of last year,” Mr. Ruben said. “Then, when Occupy happened, we kind of jumped in. It was articulating the exact same concerns that our members were really frustrated about and had been working on all year, but in a really compelling, amazing way. So, we sort of jumped in to connect people with it, to support it.”

MoveOn’s involvement triggered a backlash from Occupiers who abhor the organization’s work on Democratic political campaigns. Last week, AdBusters, the anticorporatist magazine that initially launched the call for a Wall Street occupation, published a scathing online editorial blasting MoveOn for sending Occupy-themed solicitations for donations and calling the organization part of the “dead body of the old left.”

“MoveOn wants to hijack our movement with their 99% Spring,” the AdBusters editorial said. “MoveOn is an existential threat to our movement because they don’t have a revolutionary bone in their body.”

Mr. Ruben vigorously denies the charge his group was trying to co-opt the Occupiers. He also suggested protesters’ intolerance of different approaches may hurt them, especially as the presidential election
nears.

“Many of these groups and strains, who have been fighting together against economic inequality and for the power for the 99 percent, are going to go in different directions around the elections,” Mr. Ruben said. “Some people want to put their energy in different places and, I think, we need to have a notion of a diversity of strategies that we all respect, because we’re doing the work of the 1 percent if we just tear each other down.”
Electoral politics can be a “useful tool,” he added, “and even if that’s not your bag, hopefully we can sort of honor the fact that some folks are going to want to get into that.”

Protesters we spoke to seemed unconcerned what others think of their methodology and confident they’ll blow the city’s collective mind, come May Day. “Ultimately, this will be a catalyst for a lot of people who are in their early 20s and relatively middle class to wake up and recognize their place in the theater of the world and the social struggle,” said one Occupy organizer we spoke to after the planning meeting.

“That brings more people to it. It’s a new context.”

What remains to be seen is whether the Occupiers can continue to make an impact on the larger world by speaking on their own terms. And whether they can regain the attention of a city populated with habitual ignorers. The kids say they’re all right. The rest of us will find out on May 1.

hwalker@observer.com

So it wasn’t the vote itself that was interesting. But a maneuver that took place before the vote spoke volumes about the bill’s recklessness.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the bill’s most powerful champion, decided at the last minute to exempt one of the city’s biggest proposed developments from the bill’s wage mandate. The proposed Hudson Yards project, which calls for a mixed-use development on 26 acres on the Far West Side, will not have to adhere to the law’s requirement that workers receive $10 an hour if they receive benefits, and $11.50 if they do not.

Any project that receives more than $1 million in city subsidies is covered under the “prevailing wage” bill—except for Hudson Yards. Why? Well, even Speaker Quinn realizes that the Hudson Yards project is critical to the development of the Far West Side. It’s now or never for an area that has been in desperate need of development for decades. Ms. Quinn, a likely mayoral aspirant next year, clearly realized that the bill could doom the project.

But what of other projects that will not get done now because of this unnecessary mandate? If the bill was bad for Hudson Yards, it surely is bad for other projects and other developers. That speaks to the bill’s job-killing flaws—flaws that should have stopped this legislation in its tracks.

Unfortunately, it is now law. Ms. Quinn will have to answer for this on the campaign trail next year.

As Mr. Cuomo noted himself, there is no shortage of lobbyists seeking to influence the state’s educational policy. The teachers’ union, most notably, has plenty of political muscle, but so do principals, superintendents, janitors and every other stakeholder in the public school system. So who represents students? Mr. Cuomo says he will.

As part of his focus on school reform, Mr. Cuomo will put together a new commission that will address three key issues: teacher accountability, student achievement and the management of the state’s public schools. These are hot-button issues for all those other lobbyists out there who are seeking to protect their constituents from the sort of reforms that students deserve. Let’s hope Mr. Cuomo is prepared for battle, because that’s precisely what he will have on his hands.

The fate of a state law mandating teacher evaluations offers an object lesson for any school reformer. Unions representing teachers and principals have stalled full implementation of evaluations, no doubt because these new procedures threaten to bring dreaded accountability into the state’s classrooms. This is the mind-set Mr. Cuomo proposes to change on behalf of students. He had better be serious.

Mr. Cuomo has it exactly right: in the battle over education reform, the only stakeholders who lack a voice are the children whose future prospects hang in the balance. A new study by economists at Harvard and Yale universities showed that high-performing teachers have a permanent impact on their students, leading them to more successful jobs and careers.

There is no question that good teachers can make a difference and that bad teachers are obstacles to progress. As chief lobbyist for the state’s school children, Mr. Cuomo will have to remind his colleagues of that simple but important truth.

If you build it, will they follow? (FCR)

For nine years now, Bruce Ratner has talked of transforming Brooklyn with his Atlantic Yards project. Bringing professional sports back to the borough, creating a new skyline, “a neighborhood practically from scratch,” as architect Frank Gehry once described it. There would be union jobs and affordable housing for all to enjoy.

As of now, only basketball and a handful of those jobs are guaranteed, all of which took three times as long as originally planned. Mr. Ratner and his partners like to blame the economy and the holdouts who sued to save their property, but the fact remains, they are running well behind schedule, possibly even in violation of previous commitments made to the state when the project was approved.

To catch up, Forest City Ratner has come up with a novel solution for myriad problems with his project: modular construction. More than transforming Brooklyn, Mr. Ratner may transform the way the entire city, even the world, builds. At least that is his hope.

“It’s taken us a while to get there on the architecture,” Mr. Ratner told The Observer last month on the day he unveiled his new plans for a modular approach at Atlantic Yards. “We did a lot of work to make sure it was something appropriate, in fitting in with the arena and a good reflection on Brooklyn, the city and our country.”

He is not alone in his optimism, either.

Mr. Ratner claims that with his new building process, not only will he be able to build by far the largest modular project ever, a 340,000-square-foot apartment tower rising 32 stories over Flatbush Avenue, but he will do it at a savings of 20 percent over conventional construction. He is working with an unproven technology that has been a dream of architects since Henry Ford began rolling cars off the assembly line a century ago.

Small advances have been made in the intervening, but nothing close to what Mr. Ratner is proposing has been achieved until very recently, and even then, there are questions about the viability of a project at the scale he is proposing. Mr. Ratner has admitted to falling under the spell of a YouTube video that demonstrates the current promise: a 15-story hotel erected in China in two days and finished several days after that. “That was the icing on the cake,” he said, “but we’d already been working on this for a while.”

There are those in the construction industry who view this in-sequence proposal with skepticism, but there is an equally strong tendency to simply build the next building just like the last one. Things have changed only so much since the pyramids. At the same time, Mr. Ratner is in the process of winning over once-wary construction unions. They had once feared losing good-paying jobs over a quicker, cheaper building process, much of the savings of which comes from off-site construction, but a number of union officials The Observer spoke with were sanguine about the prospects presented by prefab. Forest City is in the midst of negotiating the specifics of its plan with them.

“I think prefab is the wave of the future, and I think it will come to New York,” said Patricia Lancaster, a former Department of Buildings commissioner now teaching at NYU. “The only question is when and how much power the unions have to do something about it.” She points to the expiration of the New York Plan in January, the overarching arbitration agreement that governs the unions. “After that, anything could happen.”

Forest City is proposing building 40 percent of its project out of more than 930 modules, which will be made in a factory, trucked onto the site, hoisted into place and finished there. Because the prefab process reduces the materials, time, energy and exposure of the total project, as well as employing lower-cost union labor, it could greatly reduce the price of the project. Forest City predicts 20 percent savings from these measures, and hopes to drive the cost further down, as it continues to build the rest of its 15 apartment towers on the 22-acre site.

“Atlantic Yards is the only place this could ever happen,” Forest City Ratner executive vice president MaryAnne Gilmartin said. “Nowhere else could you find the scale to justify building a new factory on spec.”

Once the project is up and running, Forest City believes its presumed success will attract other developers to the modules, which are being built by a firm called XSite. Forest City’s requirements drove off a handful of modular firms considering working on the project, as revealed by the dogged blogger Norman Oder in October. One of these, Kullman Offsite Construction, sued XSite, as a number of the firm’s employees left and ultimately joined Mr. Ratner’s efforts. The suit was dismissed in July.

“In a way, it’s been an R&D project, not just a ‘D’ project,” Mr. Ratner said.

We've been dreaming prefab dreams for decades. (Getty)

Richard Anderson, president of the New York Building Congress, believes Forest City has no choice but to go prefab to make the project viable. “Just start putting it together: a tough construction market, a commitment to build union, a commitment to build affordable housing, to build infrastructure, this is a bear of a development challenge,” he said. “They’re between a rock and a hard place, and this may be their only option.”

The fact that prefab, after decades of dreaming, could finally take off is what has so many unions interested. The current assumption is that the bulk of residential construction will still be built through conventional means, but the market for affordable housing, where modular has already enjoyed some minor success, could be huge. After all, half of the first tower at Atlantic Yards, and 30 percent of its total apartments, will be set aside for low- and middle-income families.

“Unions have never really had any kind of hold in the world of affordable housing,” one labor source said. “We are taking it slow, but there is huge potential upside here.” If the labor agreement between unions, contractors, Forest City Ratner and XSite is properly written, it could ensure union jobs on many future prefab projects, and not just in the factory, but in the field, as well.

And for an industry with the highest unemployment in the city, hovering around 30 percent, construction workers cannot exactly say no to new work. If prefab means more jobs, as some of the more than 600 stalled construction projects across the five boroughs are revived, it could even mean more work. And Forest City has talked of exporting prefab modules across the country and even the globe, which could mean yet more jobs.

Given the complexity of building a 32-story prefab tower—with taller ones to come—a number of building professionals were suspicious the firm could achieve the 20 percent cost savings Forest City has been boasting about. Among them is Jerilyn Perine, the executive director of the Citizens Planning & Housing Council and a former housing commissioner in both the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, where she worked on a number of low-income modular projects. “I’m not against modular. I think it has its place,” she said. “I don’t think it’s like discovering fire.”

Even boosters of the process are ambivalent about modular’s prospects. “You go down this path, you promise a lot of things,” one engineer who has done modular work said. “Whether or not you realize those things, it remains to be seen. It’ll be cool if it works, but it’s a pretty heavy lift.”

Among the challenges facing Forest City is that to build the tallest modular structure in the world would require a structural system the likes of which has never been achieved. “Technology moves very fast, people move very slow,” Ms. Lancaster countered. Indeed, SHoP, the architects behind the arena and apartment towers, had two separate design teams working on the project at once, walled off from each other. They used different engineers and everything, had a mini architecture competition, and the prefab team came out on top.

Despite the promise at Atlantic Yards, there is skepticism of the applicability of prefab elsewhere. Simply getting modules over the bridges and into Manhattan would seem to pose a challenge, not to mention the tight streets. Such a building in the Financial District seems remote. Regardless, almost everyone in the industry seems to be rooting for Forest City.

"It's interesting how New Yorkers have a hard time thinking outside the box sometimes," said Jennifer Murphy, a vice-president at Plaza Construction. "For such a forward-thinking city, we can really lag behind. Maybe this will be the turning point."

If modular happens, it would be a miracle. But then again, so is the fact Atlantic Yards is being built in the first place.

mchaban@observer.com

"Is this thing on?"

It's a beautiful Friday, and Zuccotti Park looks... different. Sure, there are the protesters we've come to know and expect, and the media is still there, full force. But something seems off.

"A lot of people are unhappy that the Libertarians are joining up," one General Assembly member told us on the condition of anonymity, "and there are some Tea Party people here too."

Well... right. Isn't that what Occupy Wall Street is all about? Giving everyone a voice? Not having a distinct list of demands or qualifications besides a general sense of anger at Big Banks and government bailouts?

Not anymore. This is what Democracy now looks like: Anarchy at war with its own internal organization.

Every section of Liberty Plaza is now being maximized for efficiency. There are vendors — the type you would see in Times Square — selling miniature Wall Street Bulls, snow globes, pins of African-American leaders, etc. The food truck vendors flanking the park aren't getting that much action, the occupation does not seem to be lacking for food. Besides the food donation area, there are pizzas being delivered on a regular basis from sympathizers who can order online and send to the park. There are stacks of bottled water, and an irrigation system on the opposite side of the food line: it's part of the compost and waste disposal system set up by a group called Mobile Design Lab.

The General Assembly itself has ballooned to include fifteen subgroups, including: Town (?), Learning + Education, Outreach, Media, Sanitation, and the "Arts & Culture" committee that everyone wants to be on. (Did you know Occupy Wall Street is holding its own biennial?). Their area of the park — near the pizza boxes — is by far the most dense.

Richard Brodsky, the former New York Assemblyman, is talking to a man with a fake Fox News camera made of cardboard. When we ask him if he's seen any Libertarians in the crowd he responds, "What the fuck?"

"Look, this is the best thing since sliced bread," Mr. Brodsky said, gesturing to the park, "There is no structure, it's more of a statement on how people should be treating each other than an institute of public policy. Change isn't made through public policy wonks, it's made organically." Then he leaves us, to go find someone from ABC with whom he has a real interview scheduled.

We begin to wonder if anyone realizes that that Fox News camera is fake. (So is that Sarah Palin impersonator walking around.) Everyone is now soundbite ready, and can talk about their particular cause at the drop of a hat. The park's demographic is now 50-50: half journalists (or people acting as citizen journalists), half protesters. Sometimes they switch parts and the person being interviewed will pick up their cameras or cell phone and start asking questions.

Since the Megamarch with the New York Unions, the group now skews older; we see two elderly ladies standing in the front of Zuccotti, holding signs that read, "Pissed off Grey Hairs say 'Jail the Wall Street Bastards." Next to them, a 20-something woman is hawking clothing, "Buy a shirt, support the cause, join the fight!"

We pick up pamphlets from the many folding tables now constructed around the perimeter, offering everything from green energy alternatives (Communityenergyinc.com... which has a deal with Con-Ed which they have "mixed feelings about," according to their spokesperson) to a "Free Law Counsel" area (where you can pick up an information packet about joining CUNY's law school).

There is a group called Coaching Visionaries which was formed four days ago, and is comprised of Certified Professional Coaches who are a little bit murky on what -- or who -- they are coaching. "Our website doesn't have a lot of stuff on it yet," one of the women admits. At first we think their literature has a typo, but no, the URL for the group is actually "www.visionaries.co." A woman thrusts a piece of paper in our face that reads "Johnson & Johnson Suspected in Attempted Murder" and directs us to FlossRings.com. There's also AVAAZ.org, an online petition group that broadcasts in 14 different languages and promises to have their ticker of signers up and running soon.

Chris Martenson, PhD is selling his book here, The Crash Course, and while he is telling us about the crisis in the global economy, I realize that the cameraman filming us isn't from a network...he's doing a documentary on the Dr. Matenson. If you can't be on the media, bring your own, right?

Every time we stop to write something down, another person pops us in front of us, asking what publication we're from and offering us a quote. Old, young, anarchists, suits...the only people we can't find in what now looks like a college job fair are those damn Libertarians that everyone is so worried about.

As we're leaving, we see one more sign, outside the park:

We wonder, briefly, what kind of membership deal this gym is offering to members of Occupy Wall Street, before realizing that it's a joke. At least, we hope it is.

So how long can this go on?

"Forever," says one girl with a bandana over her face. "Or until it gets cold out."

Julie Finch at last night's Megamarch (Photos via Marielle Solan)

Yesterday afternoon it was sunny and warm. By this point, we almost knew the way to Zuccotti Park by heart. But the huge Megamarch planned for Wednesday didn't start in the recently renamed Liberty Plaza: it began (for us at least) at Foley Square, right across from the steps where they filmed Law & Order. In the tiny park, union workers and students streamed in from either side of Worth Street and Broadway; history in the making. Their numbers were in the thousands. It was epic.

It was also exhausting. We may have sat down for a smoke break on the steps of 60 Centre Street, where we may have run into an ex from long ago, who may or may not currently be a city council member.

"I'm confused," this hypothetical friend said, "I thought these were supposed to be all these young liberals, but I just saw a sign that said 'Destroy the Federal Reserve.' Are the Ron Paul Libertarians involved in this now?"

We wished we had an answer for him. Yesterday's Megamarch contained a much more diverse group of people than our first portrait excursion last week. With the unions added, we spoke to men and women who were well past retirement age; With the student walk-outs, we also spoke to people young enough to be their grandkids. And while everyone seemed to have gotten Jesse LaGreca's memo on how to talk to journalists and staying on message with the 99 % line, the range in ages, lifestyles, and yes -- socio-economic background -- yesterday's rally was ultimately a testament to the American melting pot of dissatisfaction. A reoccurring slogan we heard almost as much as "This is what democracy looks like!" was "This isn't a real rally, you should have been there for the WTO/Vietnam/RNC demonstration."

It wasn't all bad though. At the very least, we got to experience what it was like to have an 80-year-old woman school us on proper police etiquette, should we ever be arrested. "Always carry your I.D. and $25 in your wallet for bail," we were told, and assumed that our new friend wasn't counting inflation.

Here then, are 50 portraits displaying the range of people we saw yesterday: students, union workers, lawyers, the unemployed, the disenfranchised, the media news hosts....all of them. Enjoy.

Photos courtesy of Marielle Solan

Even with demand rising, as the remnants of the boom are bought up, the credit markets are still tight, making it hard for developers to find financing for new construction. This is why the one sector that has seen growth over the past three yeas is heavy construction and civil engineering, due to the expansion of publicly funded infrastructure projects. (Who says the stimulus was a bust!)

Overall, construction employment has fallen 25 percent from its peak in the third quarter of 2008, smack in the middle of the Lehman collapse. At the time, there were 136,000 construction workers employed in the city, compared to 101,200 last quarter. The last time things were this bad was the second quarter of 1998, when only 99,000 people were working construction.

According to the Building Congress, wages have actually risen slightly, from $49,249 last quarter compared to $48,392 in the first quarter of 2008. How this will factor into the coming labor negotiations, when developers are expected to use the recession to gain leverage over the labor unions, is unclear.

"The construction industry historically lags the broader economy," Richard Anderson, president of the Building Congress, said in a release. "We are one of the last to feel the effects of a downturn, as well as one of the last to recover. In this respect, a drop in employment is not too surprising in and of itself."

One cause for concern, though? The Observer's favorite economic indicator, the AIA Architecture Billings index plummeted last month, as well, according to numbers released yesterday. Nationally, they fell from 50.5 in March to 47.6 in April, where a reading over 50 means architect's billings of clients are rising and anything below means they are falling.

That said, billings for the Northeast region continue to stand above 50, after spending January and February in declining territory. If this trend continues, it will still be six to 12 months before architects' drawings find their way through the system to the jackhammers and welders of the city, but at least the worst might finally be over.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

At some level, it's not exactly a huge surprise to learn that there are people in New York who can make certain kinds of tickets disappear. Doesn't everyone know somebody who claims to know somebody who can take care of these annoyances?

It shouldn't be that way, because it's not fair--most of the time, anyway. Of course, cops often write their share of bad or unfair tickets, especially when they're under pressure to meet monthly quotas, which, we are constantly assured, do not exist.

Most tickets, however, are written for good cause. Those on the receiving end should pay up and be done with it, even if they happen to be cops themselves, or the spouse or child of one, or a friend of a friend of one. But it's clear that the process is not so simple. The NYPD is embroiled in a growing scandal over ticket-fixing in the Bronx, with perhaps as many as 400 officers implicated in the scheme. The department's internal disciplinary unit is gearing up to adjudicate formal charges on a massive scale.

Part of the problem here involves union politics. It turns out that many of the alleged fixers are union delegates who apparently hold on to their power and influence by taking care of tickets issued to their colleagues and their friends and family members. According to media reports, fixers often change license plate numbers on tickets or simply throw them out during the slow overnight tours.

This is a scam, pure and simple. The NYPD appears to be taking these charges extremely seriously. Hundreds of cops may find themselves out of work before this business is done.

The most egregious offenders deserve whatever punishment they get. But the department must address a larger issue as well: The sense of entitlement that leads to these sorts of problems.

There's no arguing the simple fact that cops and their families make great sacrifices. Some, of course, make the ultimate sacrifice. Their service to the city is beyond measure.

That said, laws and regulations apply to everybody, even those with a PBA card in their wallets. Cops have to get over the idea that they can manipulate the system on behalf of their colleagues, families and friends. If you get a ticket, pay the fine. Is that so hard to understand?

Democratic City Councilman James Sanders said "we need to take this surplus" and "make sure we save the teachers." The surplus, as I and other people have noted, don't really exist (or, as the City Comptroller has said, it really just "depends who you ask.")

Republican City Councilman Dan Halloran told the protesters "It's good to see somebody out here who cares about kids because it's clear the Bloomberg administration doesnt."

And Democratic State Senator Tony Avella keeps up the outspoken tradition he cultivated when he was in the City Council, and told the crowd, "I want to start a recall petition for the mayor." 

Note: In case you think Avella is onto something, think again. One attorney told me there is no recall mechanism in New York, so the issue is a "no go." Political consultant Jerry Skurnik -- a walking encylopedia of information -- emailed to explain the backstory: 

Former Senator Vander Beatty led a petition drive to amend the City Charter to allow recall during Koch's first term because he was made about Koch defunding some anti-poverty programs. But he did not submit enough signatures and the issue died.