The Jersey City Independent "

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By 10:30 pm last night, Alexander Waight was home, recording a post-mortem for yesterday’s Occupy New Jersey protest in Jersey City.

“Good evening brothers and sisters,” he began, speaking into his camera. “As you know, Occupy New Jersey was not as successful as we thought it would be, but it was still successful in the long run.”

That remains to be seen.

The movement began almost three weeks earlier when Waight, a 24-year-old office clerk from Irvington, was arrested while attempting to enter a Bank of America building in Lower Manhattan while wearing a mask. A few days later, he launched the @OccupyNJ Twitter account, then joined his followers to an independent Occupy New Jersey movement forming on Facebook. By the time the groups decided to occupy Colgate Park, in the shadow of Goldman Sachs at 30 Hudson Street, both the Twitter and Facebook accounts had more than 1,000 followers each.

But when Waight arrived shortly after 2 pm, Colgate Park was barricaded, police presence was heavy and the about 30 on-time protesters seemed confused about where exactly to set up shop. As Waight sped through a steel gate bottleneck between the closed-off park and the Goldman Sachs driveway, shouting “hello occupiers!” from his Razor scooter as he weaved through protesters and reporters, directing them all to follow him forward to the nearby 9/11 memorial at Grand Street, one began to sense a lack of permanence. The crowd, like the Hudson River it stood by, ebbed and flowed a bit through the afternoon, but never crested above 100 or so people.

By 6 pm, Waight’s occupiers decamped. With two police motorcyclists escorting them, a police bus and patrol car preceding them, and a half dozen emergency vehicles en route, less than 30 protesters marched from Goldman Sachs, then splintered between the Grove Street Farmer’s Market and City Hall. Shortly thereafter, Occupy New Jersey’s Jersey City occupation came to an end, packing up like the kettle corn vendor and food trucks with whom they shared the PATH station plaza.

Waight’s video, posted late last night on Occupy New Jersey’s Facebook page, attributed the protest’s collapse with a dissatisfaction not being able to camp out at the state-owned Colgate Park. He said he had access to a letter from Gov. Christie directing Jersey City Police Department (JCPD) to close the park to protesters and was seeking legal aid to help him challenge this.

In the interim, Waight announced his intentions to regroup with a planning meeting at the Grove Street Farmer’s Market on Monday afternoon. And others affiliated with the movement say they plan on an informal continuation of the protest, also at Grove Street PATH plaza, this afternoon during the weekly Creative Grove market.

Whether or not Colgate Park’s closure was at Christie’s behest, the JCPD did plan it in advance, advising area residents on Wednesday night that the park would “be closed to the public on Thursday and may remain closed on Friday depending on the extent of protest demonstrations,” according to an advisory sent by the Paulus Hook Neighborhood Association.

By Thursday morning, the police had not only closed Colgate Park but had dispersed dozens of vehicles, patrol cars, buses, trucks and mobile command centers which ran along Hudson Street from the Exchange Place PATH station to behind the Colgate Clock. K9 units guarded Liberty Towers; 77 Hudson and 70 Greene Street closed their garages; Goldman Sachs closed Sussex Street access to the waterfront, and a police control tower watched over their driveway at Essex Street.

Goldman Sachs employees, who had to show their ID to access the walkway, including a Cosi sandwich shop, were also told what to expect on Wednesday night.

“I knew it was coming,” one Goldman Sachs executive, who didn’t want to provide his name, explained. “The building put out a warning that there would be an extreme police presence in front of our building.”

But that warning had less to do with a security risk, he believed, and more to do with life after 9/11.

“I was here in ’93 and ’01, so whenever we see low-flying planes, or whenever there’s an exercise with the police going on, we’re told about it,” he said. “So we were warned late last night and early this morning this would be going on, so people wouldn’t be anxious about a visible police presence.”

Despite joking with his friends about the eclectic array of protesters’ signs, he supported their right to assemble and admitted Wall Street deserves their fair share of the blame.

“Absolutely I think everybody has the right to protest,” he said. “It’s not Tahrir Square and the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, but it’s great to see protest happening.”

What he believed was worthy of protest was the concept of Wall Street being responsible for the economic collapse.

“Wall Street firms sold products that were a lot more risky than they told to the investing public, and the housing bubble was really partially created by the easy availability of cash,” he explained. “It was the availability of easy money to people who never should have been given money that turned real estate into a boom then a bust.”

Among the first protesters to arrive, before 2 pm, was Neil Lori, a 44 year-old out of work carpenter from Bloomfield. Lori, who hadn’t worked full-time since 2008, felt his voice stopped being heard once he stopped collecting benefits as those who stop collecting benefits are no longer measured in the reported unemployment rate.

“Goldman Sachs took billions of yours and mine and everybody else’s tax dollars through the bailout plan and then they either sat on it or invested it in projects that don’t create jobs for Americans,” Lori said, though he was optimistic there was opportunity for turnaround if people came together. “I believe that Congress and the president, if they see a lot of the people in the country protesting, they’ll stand up to these greedy multinational corporations.”

He believed one solution was an increase in the hourly minimum wage.

“Minimum wage is a slave wage of $7.25 an hour; it should be $15 an hour,” Lori said, but a Jersey City Department of Buildings employee watching from across the plaza disagreed.

“They’re nuts,” he said, taking a break outside to watch the protest with his co-workers. “What are they complaining about? They want a living wage? Who’s going to pay for it? The taxpayers? They’ll raise taxes.”

One protester, Skip Smith, of Jersey City, made his living wage from the same companies he spent Thursday protesting.

“I do temp work, doing technical stuff, but work’s been less than steady so I have unfortunate amounts of free time,” Smith said of his decision to join the Occupy New Jersey movement, which he learned about while occupying Wall Street. “You don’t see stuff coming over to Jersey City all that much. It’s cool to see stuff in the town I live in, versus always going over to New York and participating there.”

While Smith knows Jersey City has become a major destination for financial firms in the wake of 9/11, he knows that most of the big-wigs still have their offices on the other side of the river, in Manhattan.

“A lot of this is back-office stuff. It’s not the people who destroyed the economy but the people who process the paychecks of the people who destroyed the economy,” Smith said of his surroundings. “But still, they’re here and it should be protested.”

What should be protested?

“I think there just needs to be a shift in America. The corporations control everything. These are the companies that buried our economy and we give them billions of dollars for the favor,” Smith said. “I think things just need to change. It’s not about any specifics, like, this legislation needs to pass. I think it’s just about relating to a movement that re-balances things, that puts people on a higher level than corporations.”