Mayor Bloomberg said today that Brookfield Properties relented on their demands to clean up Zuccotti Park after they were threatened by local lawmakers.
“My understanding is Brookfield got calls from many elected officials threatening them and saying if you don’t stop this we will make your life more difficult,” the mayor told John Gambling on his weekly radio show. “If those elected officials spend half as much time trying to promote the city and get jobs to come here we would go a long ways to answering the concerns of the protesters.”
Mr. Gambling interrupted him at this point, saying “Mr. Mayor did I hear you correctly?” and asked if in fact Brookfield received phone calls asking them to leave the protesters alone.
“I’m told they were inundated with lots of elected officials who called,” the mayor said.
Yesterday, a number of elected officials held a raucous press conference on the periphery of Zuccotti Park, and many of them slammed the mayor for seeming to enable Brookfield’s efforts to clean up the park.
The mayor repeatedly insisted that the eviction and clean-up order came from Zuccotti Park–pointing out that if the protests occurred at a public park, then they would already have been evicted–and said that even though protesters were given a reprieve to negotiate, the reprieve was most likely a temporary one.
“Make no mistake: We will do what is necessary to maintain public health and safety but there is a limit to what we can do in a private park,” he said. “And if they want to take a couple of days to work something out they are welcome to do that. I have asked what happens if they cannot and the answer I got was they would want to go ahead and do exactly what they were going to do this morning.
Mr. Bloomberg also spoke of his own visit to Zuccotti Park, where he was inundated himself with handshakes, offers of food, and apparently, drugs.
“I actually took a walk through the park the night before last. Nice people. Everybody wanted to shake your hand people offered food. One guy offered something more than that.”
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