Ⓐnarcho Queer

Tompkins Square Park Riot (1988)

In 1988, the Manhattan Community Board 3 decided to adopt a 1 am curfew for the previous 24 hour park known as Tompkins Square Park. At the time, the park was known for being home to countless homeless people who set up tents and create their own homeless shelter as well as punks, many who lived in squatted building. Tompkins was known at the time as “Tent City”. The curfew was ordered to kick out the homeless and “to bring a little law and order back to the park and restore it to the legitimate members of the community,” as the NYPD’s Captain McNamara put it. It was another way to criminalize the poor and make the white folks who were currently gentrifying the neighborhood feel comfortable.

On July 31, a protest rally against the curfew saw several clashes between protesters and police. That night, police entered the park in response to alleged noise complaints, and by the end of the call several civilians and six officers were treated for injuries, and four men were arrested on charges of reckless endangerment and inciting to riot. Sarah Lewison, an eyewitness, said the protest was over rumors of a midnight curfew at the park and another witness, John McDermott, said the police provoked the melee. Angry organizers planned another rally for August 6.

At 11:30pm on August 6th, protesters entered the park with a banner reading “Gentrification Is Class War, Fight Back”. The NYPD, who were already at the scene, charged into crowd and began rioting. Protesters fought back by throwing bottles.

New York Times photographer Angel Franco and the New York Daily News reporter Natalie Byfield were beaten by police despite having their press identity cards visible. Franco was beaten after taking photo of the NYPD beating a couple who just emerged from a grocery store. Jeff Dean Kuipers, a reporter for Downtown Magazine was clubbed after an officer told his African-American companion, Tisha Pryor, to “move along, you black nigger bitch” and beating her. Kuipers told Newsday “[The police] ran into the crowds with horses. I saw residents pulled off their stoops … They cracked my friend’s head open. It didn’t matter if you were a journalist or a resident or a storekeeper.”

Pryor is seen crying, with blood flowing down the back of her neck, in a videotape made by artist Clayton Patterson. Another video made by freelance cameraman Paul Garrin shows officers swinging clubs at him and slamming him against a wall. Photographer John McBride, taking still photos of the riot that were to be published in The Village Voice, was also struck by a policeman’s nightclub in the same attack taped by Garrin. Mr. Fish, a travel promoter out for an evening on the town, attempted to hail a taxi on Avenue A near when he was suddenly struck on the head. “I was just standing there watching,” he said. “The next thing that I remember is seeing the stick, and then a young woman who was helping me.” Patterson’s videotape showed that no officers helped Fish until an ambulance arrived. A police helicopter hovered over the scene, contributing to a sense of chaos.

During the (police) riot, a group of protesters rammed a police barricade into the Christodora House, a high-rise luxury building on Avenue B. They trashed the lobby and chanted “Die Yuppie Scum”.

After major media outlets criticized the police, including an editorial in the New York Times entitled “Yes, A Police Riot”, Mayor Ed Koch was forced to temporarily revoke the curfew.

Source: anarcho-queer