MANAMA, Bahrain — Without warning, hundreds of heavily armed riot police officers rushed into Pearl Square here early Thursday, firing tear gas and concussion grenades at the thousands of demonstrators who were sleeping there as part of a widening protest against the nation’s absolute monarchy.
Men, women and young children ran screaming, choking and collapsing.
The square was filled with the crack of tear gas canisters and the wail of ambulances rushing people to the hospital. Teams of plainclothes police officers carrying shotguns swarmed through the area, but it was unclear if they used the weapons to subdue the crowd.
“There was a fog of war,” said Mohammed Ibrahim as he took refuge in a nearby gas station. He was barefoot, had lost his wallet and had marks on his leg where he said he had been beaten. “There were children, forgive them.”
At least two people were killed in the mayhem, according to witnesses at a nearby hospital and news agency reports. Many people were injured in the chaos — trampled, beaten or suffocated by the tear gas.
The unrest posed another diplomatic challenge to the United States as it struggles with how to respond to largely peaceful movements against entrenched rulers. Bahrain has long been a strategically important American ally, hosting the Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
Only hours before Thursday’s crackdown on the protests, the square had been transformed from a symbol of the nation — anchored by a towering monument to its pearl-diving history — into a symbol of the fight for democracy and social justice that has been rocking autocratic governments all across the Middle East. Tens of thousands of people had poured into the square during the day, setting up tents, giving rousing speeches and pressing their demands for a constitutional democracy.
By 11 p.m. Wednesday, the square had started to quiet down. Young men sat smoking water pipes, while young children slept on blankets or in tents. At 2:45 a.m. Thursday, the camp was quiet, those awake still reflecting on the remarkable events of the day. And then, the blue flashing lights of police vehicles began to appear, encircling the square. At first there were four vehicles, then dozens and then hundreds.
Wearing white crash helmets, the police rushed the square.
“Everybody was sleeping, they came from upside and down,” said Zeinab Ali, 22, as she and a group of women huddled, crying and angry, in small nearby market.
The protest had begun on Monday, when young organizers called for a “Day of Rage,” modeled on the uprisings in Egypt or Tunisia. On that day, the police were unforgiving, refusing to allow demonstrators to gather, overwhelming them with tear gas and other rounds. One young man was killed, shot in the back by the police. A day later, another young man, a mourner, also was killed, shot in the back.
That galvanized the opposition and under pressure from the United States, the king withdrew his police force from the streets.
For a time, it appeared that change might be coming quickly to Bahrain, a tiny nation in the Persian Gulf ruled for more than 200 years by the Khalifa family. The royal family is Sunni while the majority of the nation’s 600,000 citizens are Shiite.
The Shiite community has long complained of being marginalized and discriminated against.
On Wednesday, as the protesters gained momentum, Shiite opposition leaders issued assurances that they were not being influenced by Iran and were not interested in transforming the monarchy into a religious theocracy. Those charges are frequently leveled against them by Sunni leaders here.
Still, the leaders of the largest Shiite political party, Al Wefaq, announced that they would not return to Parliament until King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa agreed to transform the nation into a constitutional democracy with an elected government.
By evening, crowds spilled out of the square, tied up roads for as far as the eye could see and united in a celebration of empowerment unparalleled for the country’s Shiites.
“They say you are few and you cannot make changes,” said Ali Ahmed, 26, drawing cheers from the crowd as he spoke from a platform. “We say, ‘We can, and we will.’”
“The people want the fall of the regime,” the crowds chanted on the darkened square, their words echoing off the towering buildings nearby.
Late at night, thousands of people remained, hoping to establish a symbolically important base of protest in much the same way Egyptians took over Tahrir Square to launch their successful revolution against Hosni Mubarak.
But the leadership’s newfound tolerance for dissent was a mirage.
Bahrain, while a small Persian Gulf state, has considerable strategic value to the United States as the base of its Fifth Fleet, which American officials rely upon to assure the continued flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the West and to protect the interests of the United States in a 20-nation area that includes vital waterways like the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz. The base is home to 2,300 military personnel, most of them in the Navy.
United States military officials said Wednesday they were taking no extra security precautions at the American base in Manama, which is not close to the protests, and that there had been no threat to United States forces in the region. “The U.S. is not being targeted at all in any of these protests,” an American military spokeswoman, Jennifer Stride, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
Bahrain has been a politically volatile nation for generations.
The Khalifa family has ruled since the 18th century and has long had tense relations with the Shiite majority. The king recruits foreigners to serve as police rather than trust Shiite citizens to wear uniforms and carry weapons.
In 2001, voters in Bahrain overwhelmingly approved a national charter to lead the way toward democratic changes. But a year later, the king imposed a Constitution by decree that Shiite leaders say has diluted the rights in the charter and blocked them from achieving a majority in the Parliament.
Before the events in Egypt and Tunisia, the traditional opposition made little progress in pushing its demands. But the success of those popular, peaceful uprisings inspired a change of tactics here, and young people led a call for a Bahraini “Day of Rage” on Feb. 14.
By nightfall Wednesday at Pearl Square, a feeling of absolute celebration took hold, a block party in the square. If the afternoons belonged to disaffected young men, the evenings belonged to the whole community.
BBC Arabic was projected on the side of the pearl monument, making Pearl Square seem like a living room where protesters sat together, relaxed and watched TV while sipping tea. At least until the police arrived.
As the sun rose over the square, the night’s events came into sharp focus. The entire field was trampled and crushed. Canvas tents and a speaker’s podium lay crushed. The sound of ambulances continued to wail, and a helicopter circled the square.
J. David Goodman contributed reporting from New York, and Elisabeth Bumiller from Washington.
Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved
NASA’s Stardust-NExT spacecraft flew past Comet Tempel 1 at 8:38 Pacific time Monday night, snapping photos as it sped by.
In 2005, the Deep Impact probe blew a crater into Tempel 1 with an 800-pound metal slug. Since then, Tempel 1 has completed an orbit around the sun, losing ice and other material to the sun’s hot glare along the way. The images will give astronomers new insight into how a comet is slowly destroyed by the sun.
“This is something we’ve never been able to see before,” said principal investigator Joe Veverka of Cornell University in an interview on NASA TV during the flyby. “We know every time a comet comes close to the sun, it loses material. But we don’t know where those changes occur.”
Stardust-NExT, which originally launched as “Stardust” in 1999, swooped within 124 miles of Tempel 1’s icy, dirty core at about 24,300 miles per hour.
The spacecraft took a total of 72 science images, 46 as it approached and 26 as it receded from the comet. As it approached, it snapped pictures once every 6 seconds.
The new images started arriving at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California about three hours after the spacecraft made its closest approach. Each image took 15 minutes to download. The Stardust crew wanted the five closest images to download first, but an unknown error sent the photos in the order in which they were taken. The astronomers had to wait until 6 am Pacific time to get the good stuff.
Luckily, the images were everything the science team hoped for.
“If you ask me, was this mission 100 percent successful, in terms of the science? I would have to say no,” Veverka said in a press conference Feb. 15. “It was 1000 percent successful!”
Stardust-NExT shot photos of new terrain that had never been seen before, as well as areas on Tempel 1 that had been covered by Deep Impact. The images showed that several regions changed significantly over the past 5 years. One of the most interesting areas looks like a blanket of material that erupted from beneath the comet’s surface and flowed downhill. That flow is now receding due to erosion, Veverka said.
“It goes much against the idea that [comets are] just icy dirtballs where nothing has happened since their formation,” Veverka said. “Apparently a lot of things have happened.”
The spacecraft also found the crater Deep Impact blew in the comet’s surface. Deep Impact never saw its handiwork, because the crater was obscured by all the dust and ice kicked up in the impact.
“That created a lot of mystery, and it also helped create this mission,” said Stardust-NExT co-investigator Pete Schultz of Brown University.
The crater is about 150 meters (492 feet) across, and has a small central mound. It looks as if the cloud of material Deep Impact excavated fell back to the surface.
“The surface of the comet where we hit is very weak. It’s fragile,” Schutlz said. “The crater partly healed itself.”
Flying close to a comet is a risky business. Comets spew jets of gas and dust from beneath their surfaces, which act as little rocket thrusters, making the comet’s position hard to predict. In the final 16 hours, the spacecraft has to navigate on its own — signals from Earth would be too slow to direct last-second turns. And for five minutes before and after closest approach, Stardust-NExT had to roll on its side to make sure the cameras were pointing straight at the comet’s heart, a maneuver that could have temporarily cut off communication with Earth.
The spacecraft also has to fly through the hailstorm of the comet’s coma, where clumps of dirt and ice collide and come apart. Co-investigator Don Brownlee of the University of Washington compared the spacecraft’s flight to a B17 in World War II flying through flak. Stardust-NExT’s instruments recorded about 5,000 dust strikes during the flyby, about 12 of which were large enough — a millimeter across — to pierce the spacecraft’s main shield.
But Stardust-NExT is a flyby veteran. The spacecraft has traveled a total of 3,525,327,446 miles since its 1999 launch, and visited asteroid Annefrank in 2002 and comet Wild 2 (pronounced “willed two”) in 2004. Stardust caught particles from Wild 2’s cloudy coma in an instrument that resembled a catcher’s mitt, and sent them back to Earth in 2006 where they are still being analyzed.
The flyby went without a hitch, the Stardust team says. The spacecraft was almost in the perfect position to photograph the comet when it arrived, and only had to roll half a degree to adjust its cameras.
The spacecraft’s near-perfect performance is particularly impressive considering its age. The 12-year-old probe was put together from recycled parts cribbed from the Voyager mission of the 1970s, the Galileo spacecraft in 1989 and the Cassini probe in 1997.
Reusing an already recycled spacecraft makes this mission space science on a shoestring, says Ed Weiler, NASA associate director for the science mission directorate. The extended mission, from after the Wild 2 samples returned to Earth until today, cost about $29 million. It would have cost about $500 million to start from scratch.
But Tempel 1 will be Stardust’s last stop. The spacecraft is running on fumes. It will continue to take photos of the comet over it shoulder for another week or two, until its fuel runs out. Then it will at last retire into the blackness of space.
Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell. Animation: Dave Mosher/Wired.com.
Viewed 0 times February 15, 2011Q&A: Walt Frazier on the Knicks, New York, and N.B.A. StyleEdit Delete Autopost BooksSports Q&A: Walt Frazier on the Knicks, New York, and N.B.A. Style by Anderson Tepper February 11, 2011, 12:00 AM Photograph from Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball & Cool. Perhaps no other athlete personified New York City and the 1970s quite like Walt “Clyde” Frazier, the Hall of Fame guard of the New York Knicks championship teams. An unflappable floor general with lightening quick reflexes, Clyde was a showstopper off the court, as well—a man-about-town who could often be found sporting a sealskin coat, “Clyde” hat with a four-inch brim, and platform shoes. So it’s no wonder, too, that his 1974 book, Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball & Cool, was a one-of-a-kind, time capsule classic. A generation of players, coaches and fans grew up with the book, co-written with New York Times sportswriter Ira Berkow and featuring photographs by Walter Ioose, Jr., and illustrations by John Lane. (President Obama has a copy in his presidential library.) Long out of print, Rockin’ Steady was recently reissued by Triumph Books, with a new preface by Berkow and afterword by Frazier, who is now the highly recognizable voice of the Knicks on the M.S.G. Network and known for his mellifluous inflection and penchant for rhyming (“hoopin’ and swoopin’,” “swishin’ and dishin’”). I met with Clyde courtside before a recent home game, and he was still the epitome of style and cool—decked out in a lavender corduroy suit with matching alligator boots, Clyde was positively gracious and loquacious as he shared memories of the old school Knicks of Barnett, Bradley, and Reed, as well as thoughts on N.B.A. fashions of today. Anderson Tepper: Your book Rockin’ Steadywas a real original—I remember having it as a kid and being fascinated by the amazing mix of photographs, illustrations, and colorful stories from your life as a player. Walt Frazier: I think that’s why they decided to bring it back. The editor at Triumph Books fell in love with it, so he approached me and asked me what I thought about bringing it back. I was flabbergasted—he wanted to bring it back after, what, 35 years? I said, “Yeah, I’d love to!” Did you remember much of the book when he asked you about re-doing it? Yeah, I did, because it was all about my stylin’ and profilin’—my thoughts on diet and exercise, my grooming tips. It was sort of an autobiography, as well: it talked about my upbringing in Atlanta, about honing my skills and being drafted by the Knicks. And it was an instructional book, too. We talked about offense and defense and alluded to the fact that I guarded some of the more prolific guards in the league: Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, “Pistol” Pete Maravich. How did you decide to include all those different elements, which, in the end, made Rockin’ Steady so much more than your average sports book? I think it was really unique at the time. It was unprecedented to have a guy talking so frankly about everything, from the instructional aspect of basketball to personal philosophies on a range of subjects. But a lot of the credit goes to Ira, the co-writer, for compiling it all and then adding a vision to it. Originally, the publisher came to Ira and just wanted an instructional book. But once Ira started talking to me he goes, “Hey, man, there’s a lot more here than just an instructional book. We got this segment where you catch flies …” Yeah, I always loved that bit where you show how to catch flies in your hands. Where did that come from? I was talking to Ira and telling him about the basketball camps I was doing. One day at lunchtime at Kutshers, I was sitting on the steps—and, of course, I’m like the pied piper, I always had like 15 to 20 kids around me. So we’re sitting around and I do like this [sweeps his hand] and I knew I had caught a fly, but there were actually two of them in my hand. So I shook them up and threw them down, and that’s how the legend began: “Clyde can catch flies!” But there’s a technique: flies fly horizontal, so you can’t reach straight out, you’ve got to come at them from the side. Now they don’t come around me anymore, they know my reputation. What about some of the other tips you put in the book, about women and “romancing” and nightlife? Yeah, you know, that was something that I thought I knew about at the time, but now realize I knew nothing about—especially dating and women. But it was a terrific time for me. We were winning, we were in the world’s greatest city. I was having a lot of fun—the championships, the memories, the going out on the town, dressing up and driving around in my Rolls-Royce. You also describe leaving the car at home on the East Side and taking the subway to the Garden for home games. Would people stop you along the way? Well, no, I’d act angry like everybody else! I find that when you’re on the subway, if you don’t catch anyone’s eye—because first of all, they go, “That looks like Clyde,” but then they go, “Nah, man, what would Clyde be doing on the subway?”—if you just look down at the floor like everyone else, or look up at the ceiling, people just won’t harass you as much. The book really captures the style and feel of the early ’70s. Some of the things you talk about are fun to look back on now, like the eight-track player and color TV that you brag about having at your bachelor pad. Right, and the round bed and some of the clothes I wore are hilarious when I look back on them now, like the wide collars and wide lapels. But I still have the furs: the white one, the black one, a raccoon one that goes all the way down to my ankles. Did the other players on the team think of you as a trendsetter? Yeah, they did, because they had suits but they didn’t have the furs, they didn’t have the Rolls, they didn’t have the shoes. So I kind of had a complete ensemble going on. You also talk about your sneakers, the Puma Clydes, which were $20 then. This was way before Air Jordans. Yeah, I was the first guy to endorse a sneaker. At that time, they were giving guys the shoes but they weren’t paying them to wear them. So Puma came to me, and I think my first deal was $5,000—all the shoes I could wear. And then right after that, we won the championship, so they came out with the suede versions. The most popular one was the blue suede with the white stripe. That’s when they really took off. We didn’t even need the rest of the country, we sold so many shoes in the tri-state area. Those shoes personified “cool.” Tell me about the players today and what you think of their style. In the book’s afterword, you mention some of the guys whose looks you admire, from Dwyane Wade to Baron Davis and Dwight Howard. Today the guys are more enthralled with the rappers, so if you see them they’re dressed more like the rappers—with the baggy pants, the baggy look. But I always say that basketball players are like models, they’re tall and thin, so that whatever they put on they’re going to look good in. LeBron’s a good dresser; Wade is very into his appearance. Patrick Ewing and Chris Duhon always used to wear suits with the Knicks. But most of the guys today are very casual. And what about all the tattoos? The tattoos are something that we never had. I guess Dennis Rodman was the first person who brought that into the league. I’m not an advocate of tattoos, especially when they’re all over the body. Some of these guys treat their bodies like canvases. There’s a whole new energy and excitement in the Garden this season with the Knicks. How does this team compare with your championship teams? Our team was different in that we were defense-oriented and we were a veteran team, whereas this team is more offensive-minded and much younger. We personified “team”: You can’t mention Frazier without Reed, without Bradley, without Debusschere. So these guys are trying to get that kind of chemistry together and this year has been better. Their defense sometimes has been their best offense; they’ve been able to create turnovers and get in transition. And now they have a superstar in Amar’e, Felton is playing like an all-star, they have young players like Chandler and Gallinari. But right now, they’re just very erratic. They might win eight straight after losing six straight—that’s how capricious the game has been for them. I wanted to ask you about your role as an announcer for the Knicks. One of the treats is listening to you tell stories of your early days with the team, going back to your rookie year, for example, in 1967. Yeah, well, there was a tradition: the rookies always got dumped on. That was just the way it was. Red [Holzman, Knicks coach] would always call me his “key man.” In those days, the hotel room keys were huge. So he used to get all these keys and put them in my pocket: “Clyde, you’re my key man!” So I’d be carrying all these keys around. And Bradley—we used to steal his shoelaces, because he didn’t really care about dressing. So he’d go to sleep on the plane and we’d take his shoelaces. He’d have to walk through the airport without his shoelaces. I think this was his way of feeling part of the team—having us make fun of him like that—because I’m pretty sure in the Ivy League no one ever did that before. And Barnett was the funniest guy on the team. He kept everyone in stitches. He had so many stories, about going to an all-black college and about the sort of antics that went on in the N.B.A. back then. When you got to the Knicks, it was towards the end of Barnett’s career, right? He played maybe three or four more years. He was really my idol: He was, like, 34 and didn’t smoke or drink, and he was a very sharp dresser. He used to wear Sherlock Holmes hats, canes, spats. He had the monogrammed cuff on his sleeves. I copied from those guys early on—where they had their suits made, where they bought their shoes. But what set me apart was the hat. I bought the “Clyde” hat and then the movie Bonnie and Clyde came out. Ironically, at that time, too, I was starting to excel on the court. I was always dressing good, but I wasn’t playing good, so writers didn’t focus on me. Then all of a sudden, I’m in the starting lineup and everyone’s saying, “Here’s this guy, Clyde, with all the hats,” and that’s how the whole fashion thing caught on. You’ve become known to a new generation more for your verbal dexterity as an announcer than your achievements as a player. In the new edition of Rockin’ Steady, you describe honing your language skills by studying the New York Times’s Arts & Leisure section. When I first started, I was doing pre-game, halftime, and post-game commentary. For the pre-game segment, we’d be sequestered somewhere high up in the arena, but then at halftime I’d come down to courtside and it would be like a three-ring circus—people asking me for autographs while I’m trying to find out where the monitor was, loud rock music playing just as I was beginning to talk. I was so intimidated. And usually you only have two or three minutes to articulate whatever it is you have to say. I was always afraid I’d start rambling and never shut up. I said to myself, man, I’ve got to improve my vocabulary. So I used to get the Arts & Leisure pages and read how they’d critique plays and movies: “riveting,” “mesmerizing,” “profound,” “ubiquitous,” “dazzling.” And I liked the way these words sounded. So I have notebooks filled with words and phrases that I’ve copied down. People think that I’m a voracious reader, but I hardly read anything. I just re-read my lists of words and phrases over and over again. I can picture another book for you with a special glossary of your basketball terminology. I did come out with Word Jam: A Guide to Awesome Vocabulary, a book for young kids. And I hope to do another book on health and fitness next. I’ve become a spokesperson for Type 2 Diabetes and how it’s rampant in our society, especially among blacks and children. I’ll be going out to schools talking about diet and exercise this year, so health and fitness is another subject I would like to write about. You were recently featured in both GQ’s 25 Coolest Athletes and New York’s Best of New York issue. You’re really an icon of New York sports, and it seems like the love affair with the city was mutual. There’s a great quote about you going up to the Harlem nightclubs after the games … Right, I would start my night on the Upper East Side because the clubs closed there early, like at midnight. But in Harlem they were just starting around 12:30-1:00 a.m. The place we’d go was Small’s Paradise. They always had a live band at the back and dancing girls in cages. It was unbelievable. But, see, I came from Atlanta and there everything closed at 12:30, so I used to go out at 9:00 when I first got to New York. I used to just go out by myself. I’d go to Small’s and there’d be nobody there at like 9:00 to 9:30. So I’d be coming home at, say, 11:30, and the next day at practice I’d hear these guys talking about the helluva time they’d had at Small’s. I’d go, “What time were you guys there?” And they’d go, “1 to 1:30.” I never knew New York didn’t get cooking until after 12:00, especially uptown in Harlem. You know, when I first played in the N.I.T., I thought how wonderful it would be to play with the Knicks, but I never thought they’d draft me—they had so many backcourt guys. In the South, football is key, so the sports pages have very little on basketball. But in the New York papers, they have like four or five pages just covering basketball. And there’s just so much electricity in the city. I’d think, Oh, man, I just wish I could be drafted by the Knicks, but I never thought it would happen. And then you went on to win two championships with the Knicks, in 1970 and 1973. Yeah, all my dreams came true—actually, everything exceeded my dreams. But I had a lot of role models: Willis Reed, Dick Barnett, Freddie Crawford. All these guys took me under their wings, gave me good advice. From Willis, I learned about sportsmanship, how to deal with the fans. If you look at my handwriting, it’s similar to Willis’s. I sort of copied his style, the way he writes, everything about the man. Only, I’m not as generous as Willis—he’d give you his car, his money. I’d never loan you my Rolls! That’s why we call him “the Captain.” I mean, this guy still calls me every year at Christmas time! Have you seen the Knicks’ new ad campaign in the subways that feature you with the tag line “from on the court to on the air”? Yes, I have. And wherever I go—to the bank, restaurants—people go, “I see you everywhere, Clyde. I can’t get away from you!” Now, with all these articles and this Vanity Fair interview, it’s like the rejuvenation of Clyde
Copyright. 2011. vanityfair.com. All Rights Reserved
On Tuesday, The Lede continues to follow protests and unrest in Bahrain, Yemen and Iran, as well as Egypt’s post-Mubarak transition. Updates below mix alerts on breaking news with reports from bloggers and journalists on the ground. A stream of Twitter updates on regional protests is in this blog’s right column.
This Al Jazeera video report shows fresh antigovernment protests on Tuesday in Yemen, and begins with demonstrators chanting, as in Egypt, “The people demand, the end of the regime.”
The report also includes an interview with a member of a group of counter-protesters in Yemen’s capital, Sana, who told Al Jazeera, in English: “We are here to support President Ali Abdullah Saleh and we can only change President Ali Abdullah Saleh by elections. We cannot change him by violence, okay, because violence breeds violence.”
Given that the Yemeni president’s supporters, armed with clubs and knives, have attacked protesters and journalists in recent days, that statement implying that the opposition has been violent is odd.
Hashem Ahelbarra, the Al Jazeera correspondent in Sana, reported on the Arab broadcaster’s Web site: “What we are seeing is thousands of pro-government protesters, armed with batons, attacking the pro-democracy protesters and dispersing the crowd using violence.” He added: “The situation is very tense – the government has been describing the pro-democracy protesters as traitors and accusing them of pushing foreign agendas.”
4:06 P.M.|Blankets and Popcorn in ‘Bahrain’s Tahrir Square’
The Channel 4 News video report on the protests in Bahrain on Tuesday, above, includes an interview with Maryam Alkhawaja, a 23-year-old activist with the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. She said that the protesters gathered in the traffic circle they are calling “Bahrain’s Tahrir Square” paid little attention to the televised address by Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa on Tuesday.
“The people in the Pearl Roundabout didn’t even listen to the speech, let alone care what the king has to say,” Ms. Alkhawaja told Channel 4 News by telephone. “All they’re demanding is that the regime leaves and they’re saying that they are going to stay here – and people are bringing tents, blankets, things to sleep on – until the regime falls.”
On Twitter, Ms. Alkhawaja reported from the square that the protesters want to rename it in honor of the two protesters who have died so far.
Ms. Alkhawaja also posted this photograph of the protesters bedding down in the Pearl Roundabout on Tuesday night.
Maryam Alkhawaja, via YfrogA Bahraini blogger’s photograph of protesters bringing blankets to the traffic circle in the capital, Manama, they have occupied.
Another blogger, Tariq Al-Olaimy, who stressed on Twitter that he is an observer, not a protester, posted these images of the Pearl Roundabout protest camp on Tuesday night:
Tariq Al-Olaimy, via YfrogA blogger’s photograph of the protest camp in Bahrain’s capital on Tuesday night, captioned by him: “Amazing, someone actually brought a popcorn machine!”
Tariq Al-Olaimy, via YfrogThe blogger who took this photograph in central Bahrain on Tuesday night explained: “with no police in sight citizens are directing traffic.”
Tariq Al-Olaimy, via YfrogProtesters projected video of BBC Arabic onto a monument in the center of the traffic circle they occupied in Bahrain on Tuesday night.
As we reported in our 12:51 p.m. update, Sayed Mahmood Alaali, a Bahraini blogger who had been using the mobile streaming site Bambuser to upload video of protests directly from his iPhone, discovered that his channel on the video-sharing site was suddenly blocked inside Bahrain on Tuesday night.
Although Mr. Alaali’s video clips remain visible to most of the world, users trying to access his Bambuser channel inside Bahrain are greeted with this error message, claiming that the site has been blocked for “violating regulations and laws of the Kingdom of Bahrain.”
We have received detailed information that some Bambuser accounts are being blocked within Bahrain, as the local government seeks to control the news in the face of demonstrations by protestors in the country. This attempt to disrupt internet communications seems to mirror what we witnessed in Egypt a few weeks back. [...]
People are still able to broadcast videos to bambuser.com
We are following the situation in Bahrain closely, and will update this blog post as soon as we see any changes in the blocking of Bambuser in Bahrain. We strongly condemn any government attempts to silence democratic movements. [...]
Also for people within Bahrain we recommend you trying out https://www.torproject.org/ which protects your privacy and which we hope give you full access to all content on Bambuser.com
Bambuser also points readers to these clips, uploaded by another blogger on Tuesday evening and night, of what looks like a large number of protesters in the Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain’s capital, Manama:
Despite reports from bloggers in Bahrain who said they were having difficulty uploading video to YouTube on Tuesday, five short clips posted on the site’s BH1net channel over the course of the day give a sense of the scale of Tuesday’s demonstrations.
The BH1net video blogger said that the two clips, shot on his phone on Tuesday, show a large funeral procession for Ali Mushaima, a protester killed one day earlier:
This clip seems to show teargas being fired at the funeral procession by the security forces (a second protester was reportedly killed with birdshot fired in an attempt to break up the procession):
These clips show protesters gathered after the funeral on Tuesday afternoon in a traffic circle known as the Pearl Roundabout, in Bahrain’s capital, Manama:’
1:21 P.M.|Bahrain Protesters Want Release of Political Prisoners
On her Twitter feed, Maryam Alkhawaja of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, reports that protesters gathered in the capital cheered when they heard what she called “News of release of all political prisoners!”
A short time later she wrote that the report had, apparently, been just a rumor: “release of prisoners apparently not true.”
12:51 P.M.|Blogger Reports Internet Filtering in Bahrain
Several bloggers in Bahrain have suggested that the government might be intentionally slowing down the Internet to keep activists and bloggers from posting video and photographs of the protests online.
Ehsan Al-Kooheji, a computer programmer who describes himself as an “IT geek,” wrote on Twitter earlier:
Internet is intentionally crippled, I can’t believe claims otherwise until I see proof, my tests show filtering. Disappointed in authorities.
In response to questions from two other bloggers, he explained that using a local Internet connection on Tuesday he had trouble using specific sites, including YouTube:
Speed is not issue, got 90% of 8MB line. Specific types of traffic (ports & headers) to specific sites get dropped or reset…. 1 example: an encrypted VPN to USA to YouTube uploads fine. Otherwise slow and reset connections.
Another blogger, Sayed Mahmood Alaali, who used the mobile streaming site Bambuser to post video of protests on Monday and Tuesday, reported on his Twitter feed within the past hour that his channel on that site had been suddenly blocked inside Bahrain.
12:39 P.M.|Bahrain Protesters Attacked as They Chant, ‘Peaceful!’
In his televised address on Tuesday, Bahrain’s king asserted that his citizens had a right to peaceful demonstrations, as long as they were in accordance with the state’s laws.
Despite that statement, several video clips posted on YouTube in the past two days seem to show Bahrain’s security forces attacking peaceful protesters.
This video, uploaded to the Web on Monday, shows one such attack, even as protesters can be heard chanting “peaceful, peaceful,” an echo of the refrain heard at demonstrations in Egypt:
This video, uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday, is said to show Bahrain’s security forces firing teargas at a large number of protesters, possibly during a funeral procession for the man killed on Monday:
The Guardian has posted this video of Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa appearing on television on Tuesday to offer his condolences and promise an investigation into hiw the security forces have handled two days of protests, during which two demonstrators have been killed:
As my colleague Michael Slackman reports, the king and Bahrain’s ruling elites are mostly Sunnis, while approximately 70 percent of the country’s population is Shiite.
Maryam Alkhawaja, a 23-year-old human rights activist reported on Twitter on Tuesday that protesters gathered at the Pearl roundabout in Manama, Bahrain’s capital, had lifted a Sunni politician on their shoulders at one stage and chanted at another that Sunni and Shiite citizens “are brothers and sisters.”
12:19 P.M.|Graphic Video and Photographs of Bahrain’s ‘Martyrs’
Graphic video and photographs have been posted online by bloggers and human rights activists in Bahrain, apparently showing the bodies of two men killed during the protests this week.
Late Monday night, Maryam Alkhawaja of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, posted a link on Twitter to a very distressing and graphic photograph of what she said was the father of the man killed during Monday’s protests, embracing the dead body of his son, apparently in a hospital.
Equally distressing video of what appears to be the same scene was also posted on YouTube by a video blogger using the screen name StopTortureBH. The same channel also includes what appear to be interviews with wounded protesters in the hospital.
On Tuesday, BahrainRights Twitter feed reported that a second protester, Fadhel Ali AlMatrook, was “killed by bird shot used by police this morning at the funeral of the first martyr.”
In another update, which included the warning “GRAPHIC CONTENT,” the rights group posted a link to a graphic photograph of the dead body of the second man showing what it called “Evidence of close range shooting” by the security forces.
As Bahraini bloggers use Twitter to report on Tuesday’s protest at the Pearl traffic circle in the capital, Manama, Bahrain’s interior ministry is also sending out messages on the social network, advising citizens “to stay away from Pearl roundabout area to avoid traffic jams.”
After one man was killed on Monday, when numerous video clips posted on YouTube seemed to show Bahrain’s security forces attacking peaceful protesters, the ministry’s moi_bahrain Twitter feed repeated several messages of support from citizens who endorsed its use of force. That led one Bahraini blogger, a computer programmer named Ehsan Al-Kooheji, to appeal to the ministry to “please retweet my disgust.”
@moi_bahrain since you are retweeting all praise u got today, please retweet my disgust, as someone who isn’t neutral anymore because of youMon Feb 14 18:28:50 via webEhsan Al-Kooheji ehsankooheji
On Tuesday, the ministry’s Twitter feed did include a message acknowledging that one man, identified as “Bahraini Fadhel Salman Matrook” was killed on Tuesday when the security forces reportedly used teargas against thousands of protesters in a funeral procession for Ali Mushaima, the protester killed on Monday.
This video, transmitted to the mobile streaming site Bambuser about 10 hours ago, at 8:31 a.m. local time on Tuesday, is said to show part of the funeral procession for the “martyr” killed on Monday:
As The Guardian reported earlier, another video blogger, Sayed Mahmood Alaali, posted this long video stream of protesters in Bahrain on Bambuser, starting at 1:18 p.m. local time on Tuesday, which is said to show part of the long funeral procession for the man killed on Monday:
Protesters in Bahrain have massed in a central area of the capital, Manama, on Tuesday and are trying to establish what Bahraini bloggers are calling “our Tahrir Square,” in reference to the Egyptian protest camp.
As my colleague Michael Slackman reports: “More than 10,000 people streamed into the capital’s central Pearl Square on Tuesday in the largest political protest to hit this Persian Gulf kingdom in recent memory. Galvanized by the death of a demonstrator in clashes with the police on Monday, protesters waved flags and chanted ‘peaceful’ under the square’s towering monument as a police helicopter hovered overhead. Hundreds of protesters also massed on a nearby bridge overpass.”
This video of the protesters setting up camp at the Pearl traffic circle, also known as the Lulu roundabout, was shot by a blogger named Sayed Mahmood Alaali, and sent from his phone to Bambuser, a Web site that allows users to stream live video from their phones:
At least four other bloggers have been using Twitter to post frequent text updates and photographs from the scene.
About 20 minutes ago, one of them, Jalal Aljazeeri, who writes as JTheIslander on Twitter, uploaded this photograph of the protesters from his iPhone to Plixi, a mobile photo-sharing site:
Jalal Aljazeeri, via PlixiA blogger’s photograph of protesters gathered in a central part of the capital of Bahrain, Manama, on Tuesday evening.
Another blogger, who writes on Twitter as RedhaHaji reported about an hour ago that protesters remained there even as the sun began to set and some families departed.
Maryam al-Khawaja of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, wrote on her maryamalkhawaja Twitter feed about two hours ago that people were already acting “like they’ve been liberated.”
Another blogger, who writes on Twitter as angryarabiya, reported simply: “Never felt this way before. We have taken over a roundabout, and for the first time we feel free!”
MANAMA, Bahrain — Thousands of demonstrators poured into this nation’s symbolic center, Pearl Square, late Tuesday in a raucous rally that again demonstrated the power of popular movements that are transforming the political landscape of the Middle East.
In a matter of hours, this small, strategically important monarchy experienced the now familiar sequence of events that has rocked the Arab world. What started as an on-line call for a “Day of Rage,” progressed within 24 hours to an exuberant group of demonstrators, cheering, waving flags, setting up tents and taking over the grassy traffic circle beneath the towering monument of a pearl in the heart of the capital city.
The crowd grew bolder as it grew larger, and as in Tunisia and Egypt, modest concessions from the government only raised expectations among the protesters, who by day’s end were talking about tearing the whole system down, monarchy and all.
Then as momentum built up behind the protests on Tuesday, the 18 members of parliament from the Islamic National Accord Association, the traditional opposition, announced they were suspending participation in the legislature.
The mood of exhilaration stood in marked contrast to a day that began in sorrow and violence, when mourners who gathered to bury a young man killed the night before by police clashed again with the security forces.
In that melee, a second young man was killed, also by police.
“We are going to get our demands,” said Hussein Ramadan, 32, a political activist and organizer who helped lead the crowds from the burial to Pearl Square. “The people are angry, but we will control our anger, we will not burn a single tire, or throw a single rock. We will not go home until we succeed. They want us to be violent. We will not.”
Bahrain is a small, strategically important nation in the Persian Gulf best known as a base for the United States Navy’s 5th Fleet and a playground for residents of Saudi Arabia who can drive over a causeway to enjoy the nightclubs and bars of the far more permissive kingdom. Its ruler, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, is an important ally of the United States in fighting terrorism and countering Iranian influence in the region.
It is far too soon to tell where Bahrain’s popular political uprising will go. The demands are economic — people want jobs — as well as political, in that most would like to see the nation transformed from an absolute into a constitutional monarchy. But the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have altered the dynamics in a nation where political expression has long been tamed by harsh police tactics and prison terms.
In a rare speech to the nation, the king expressed his regret on national television for the deaths of two young men killed by police and called for an investigation into the incidents. But in an unparalleled move he also instructed his police force to allow more than 10,000 demonstrators to claim Pearl Square as their own. But as night fell Tuesday and a cold wind blew off the Persian Gulf, thousands of demonstrators occupied the square or watched from a highway overpass, cheering. Where a day earlier the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at anyone who tried to protest, no matter how small, or peaceful, people now waved the red and white flag of Bahrain, gave speeches, chanted slogans and shared food. Police massed on the other side of a bridge leading to the square, and a police helicopter never stopped circling, but took no futher action, to the protesters’ surprise.
By 10 p.m. many of the people headed home from the square, with many saying they had plans to return the next day. A core group planned to spend the night there in tents.
“Now the people are the real players, not the government, not the opposition,” said Matar Ibrahim Matar, 34, an opposition member of the parliament who joined the crowds gathered beneath the mammoth statue. “I don’t think anyone expected this, not the government, not us.”
Bahrain’s domestic politics have long been tangled. The king and the ruling elite are Sunni Muslims. The majority, or about 70 percent, of the local population of about 500,000, are Shiite Muslims. The Shiites claim they are discriminated against in jobs, housing and education, and their political demands are not new.
The demonstrators have asked for political prisoners to be released, creation of a more representative and empowered parliament, establishment of a constitution written by the people and the formation of a new, more representative cabinet. They complain bitterly that the prime minister, Khalifah ibn Sulman al-Khalifah, the king’s uncle, has been in office for 40 years.
They also want the government to stop the practice of offering nationality to foreigners willing to come to Bahrain to serve as police or soldiers, a tactic which they say is aimed at trying to reduce the influence of Shiites by increasing the number of Sunnis.
While the demands are standard here, what is new, is the way the demonstrations have unfolded, following the script from Egypt and Tunisia. Young people organized a protest using on-line tools like Twitter and Facebook. They tapped into growing frustrations with economic hardship and political repression but were not aided by the traditional opposition movements.
The day began early, around 7 a.m., at the Salmaniya Medical Complex, where Ali Mushaima, 21, died the night before from a shotgun wound to his back. About 2,000 mourners lined up in a parking lot behind a truck that carried his coffin on the roof. As soon as the procession exited the hospital grounds, a young man bolted from the crowd and charged at police standing nearby. He threw a rock and the police opened fire, shooting tear gas into the crowd. They fired other weapons, too, and the second man, Fadel Matrouq, 31, was killed.
The mourners regrouped a block away and walked slowly for about 90 minutes behind the coffin to the Jidi Haffiz cemetery, a dusty expanse of sunbaked land dotted with simple graves. For more than an hour thousands of people milled peacefully around the area in a blend of politics, mourning and faith.
Mr. Mushaima’s father was escorted by both arms gently through the crowd, after his son was laid out on a white tile table, washed for burial and wrapped in a cloth decorated with golden Arabic script from the Koran. When the body was brought to the gravesite, there were as many as 10,000 people in the street, some mourning, some calling for the government to be dissolved, some chanting slogans and prayers.
Some people carried protest signs stating their political demands, while others carried black, yellow and red flags that said “Ya Hussein,” referring to the most revered figure in Shiite Islam.
When the body was in the ground, the crowd moved toward Pearl Square, not knowing if they would arrive at their destination or be cut off by police, again. When they made it, they rejoiced.
“The government has brought us past the tipping point,” said Abd Al Amir al-Jawri, 40, an activist who was elated, as he recorded events with a video camera. “This is it.”
Nadim Audi contributed reporting.
Copyright.2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved
LOS ANGELES— Adam Shankman is a card-carrying member of the Directors Guild of America, as he was eager to prove to the Bagger when we ran into him the other night. “Read it and weep,” Mr. Shankman said, adding in another emphatic word we can’t use as he pulled the guild card out of his wallet at the group’s awards ceremony.
Getty ImagesAdam Shankman
In addition to being an officially paper-worked director (he did the film version of the “Hairspray” musical), Mr. Shankman was a producer of the Oscars last year, known for his desire to modernize the show – he tried to get it on Twitter, of which he’s an avid user – and occasionally clashing with the Academy as he worked, Odd Couple-style, with his co-producer, Bill Mechanic. A choreographer by background, Mr. Shankman was responsible for a lengthy dance number (using people from “So You Think You Can Dance,” on which he was a judge) that replaced the best score performances, to some chagrin.
This year, “I’m talking to the producers a lot,” Mr. Shankman said, “and I’m dying to see how it turns out.”
The producers, Don Mischer and Bruce Cohen, are old friends of his, and are coming to him for advice, not the other way around, he said. Was he a part of the decision to hire James Franco and Anne Hathaway to host?
“I was not,” he said. “I’m fascinated by that decision. They are both really, really smart people. I know after last year’s show there was some talk about, is it the right thing to do to try to play to the younger audience, at the possible risk of alienating your core, which is an older demographic? But clearly they’re trying to court it” – the younger crowd — “now.”
Mr. Franco and Ms. Hathaway have kept mum about what they’ll be doing, but it is clear they will be singing and dancing. Mr. Shankman said he recommended a choreographer, Jamal Sims, a veteran of movies, award shows and last year’s Oscars. “He’s worked with me for years and years,” Mr. Shankman said. What style will we see? “He does everything, but he was hip-hop, and I know it’s not hip-hop,” Mr. Shankman said. “That’s what I did. I don’t see James doing hip-hop.”
Oh, between the gender-bending take on “Three’s Company,” the Yale Ph.D. and “General Hospital,” Mr. Franco could pull it off, we said.
Mr. Shankman had other ideas.
“I think she should come out with one arm,” he said, “and he could be naked, holding Jake Gyllenhaal’s hand. That’s the way to open that show.”
Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved
Justice Barry Kamins said New York City’s courts had already been through a lot, including the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Ronald P. Younkins, the state court system’s chief of operations, said the new manual’s preparation was similar to other steps the New York courts had taken to plan for emergencies.
Major disasters like terrorist attacks and mass epidemics raise confounding issues for rescuers, doctors and government officials. They also pose bewildering legal questions, including some that may be painful to consider, like how the courts would decide who gets life-saving medicine if there are more victims than supplies.
But courts, like fire departments and homicide detectives, exist in part for gruesome what-ifs. So this month, an official state legal manual was published in New York to serve as a guide for judges and lawyers who could face grim questions in another terrorist attack, a major radiological or chemical contamination or a widespread epidemic.
Quarantines. The closing of businesses. Mass evacuations. Warrantless searches of homes. The slaughter of infected animals and the seizing of property. When laws can be suspended and whether infectious people can be isolated against their will or subjected to mandatory treatment. It is all there, in dry legalese, in the manual, published by the state court system and the state bar association.
The most startling legal realities are handled with lawyerly understatement. It notes that the government has broad power to declare a state of emergency. “Once having done so,” it continues, “local authorities may establish curfews, quarantine wide areas, close businesses, restrict public assemblies and, under certain circumstances, suspend local ordinances.”
Ronald P. Younkins, the chief of operations for the state court system, said the book’s preparation was similar to other steps the New York courts had taken to plan for emergencies, including stockpiling respirators and latex gloves. Like such manuals in other states, Mr. Younkins said, it is intended to give judges and lawyers a place to turn in an emergency because the maze of state and federal laws — some decades or centuries old — can be difficult to decipher. For judges, the manual may well be their only refresher on the case of Mary Mallon, “Typhoid Mary,” who was isolated on an East River island from 1915 until her death in 1938.
“It is a very grim read,” Mr. Younkins said. “This is for potentially very grim situations in which difficult decisions have to be made.”
Published with the disarmingly bland title “New York State Public Health Legal Manual,” the doomsday book does not proclaim new law but, rather, describes existing law and gives lawyers and judges ways of analyzing any number of frightening situations.
The manual provides a catalog of potential terrorism nightmares, like smallpox, anthrax or botulism episodes. It notes that courts have recognized far more rights over the past century or so than existed at the time of Typhoid Mary’s troubles. It details procedures for assuring that people affected by emergency rules get hearings and lawyers. It mentions that in the event of an attack, officials can control traffic, communications and utilities. If they expect an attack, it says, they can compel mass evacuations.
But the guide also presents a sober rendition of what the realities might be in dire times. The suspension of laws, it says, is subject to constitutional rights. But then it adds, “This should not prove to be an obstacle, because federal and state constitutional restraints permit expeditious actions in emergency situations.”
When there is not enough medicine for everyone in an emergency, it notes, there is no clear legal guidepost. It suggests legal decisions would most likely involve an analysis that “balances the obligation to save the greatest number of lives against the obligation to care for each single patient,” perhaps giving preference to those with the best chance to survive. It points out, though, that elderly and disabled people might have a legal claim if they are discriminated against at such moments of crisis.
Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the 88-page book reminded her of the CliffsNotes pamphlets that have helped generations of 11th graders get through Macbeth. “Needless to say, this makes me a little nervous,” she said, adding that the legal issues the book raised were “nuanced, thorny and difficult, and hard to capture in CliffsNotes.”
In separate forewords, the state’s chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, and the bar association’s president, Stephen P. Younger, say public-health threats are more apparent than ever, so the legal questions ought to be considered now, not during an emergency.
If nothing else, the book is intensely practical, giving lawyers and judges a way to get through what would quite likely be chaotic days.
After mentioning that houses or businesses can be commandeered to shelter victims or serve as medical dispensaries, it continues that “violations of individual property rights, if actionable, would generally be sorted out after the need for such actions has ended.” The court system posted an electronic copy of the book on its Web site on Thursday, and the bar association is selling bound copies for $18 to the public. The book was edited by Michael Colodner, the former counsel to the state’s Office of Court Administration.
In its matter-of-fact way, it conjures an image of the courts muddling through in an apocalyptic city. But it makes clear that it is in just such circumstances that it may be more important than ever for the courts to remain open to grapple with the legal questions created by the emergency itself.
Without mentioning that judges and other court officials themselves may be among the dead or injured, the manual says that when there is a shortage of court personnel, administrators can take any number of steps to keep the courts operating. It says they can hold multiple proceedings before a single judge, change rules of procedure and give priority to cases arising out of the emergency.
And it provides chilling instructions on how to proceed with cases in the midst of outbreaks of contagious disease. The stockpiled gloves and respirators “already available at many courthouses,” it says, may be necessary.
But the image of an infected New Yorker surrounded by a masked judge, lawyers and court officers was a miserable one even for this gruesome guide. “The wearing of respirators by the multiple participants in a courtroom setting, would no doubt be disruptive,” the manual notes. One alternative, it suggests, is that the infected person be required to wear a respirator. Another: “Isolating an infectious litigant in a separate room with an audio-visual connection to the courtroom.”
In Brooklyn one day last week, the administrative judge of the criminal courts, Barry Kamins, listened as parts of the manual were read to him, including the section about everyone wearing masks in the courtroom. “I’m trying to imagine several people in a courtroom wearing that,” Justice Kamins said. “It’s hard to put yourself in that situation.”
But, he said, the city’s courts have already been through a lot, including the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Swine flu brought respirators to some courtrooms, as people worried about infection. Defendants who bite and scratch sometimes arrive in court in chains and are forced to wear gloves.
“It’s almost surreal, but you just go forward,” Justice Kamins said, which is how he said judges would most likely respond if the scene in the courts was even more surreal.
Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved
Enlarge The Jersey JournalIn this 2004 photo by photographer Leon Yost, the seminal Peter Stuyvesant monument stands erect on its base overlooking the still-intact 1660 street grid of Bergen Square, the first permanent European settlement in New Jersey. Stuyvesant governed the Dutch-held, 17th-century colony of New Netherland from 1647 to 1664. The area included fragments making up what is now Manhattan island and the central cities of Hudson County. The monument was conceived in 1910 as Jersey City was celebrating the 250th anniversary of the establishment of Bergen Square, an experimental village built behind tall palisade logs walls. Three years later, in 1913, the statue was unveiled in front of nearly 6,000 people, dozens of whom were direct descendants of the founding Dutch families. Photo courtesy of Yost. — John Gomez, M.S. Historic Preservation, Columbia UniversityLegends & Landmarks: Statue of Peter Stuyvesant gallery (25 photos)
My meeting with the inimitable monument was not supposed to happen here, along a desolate patch of long-crumbled curb on Tonnelle Avenue, at the foot of the precipitous incline of North Street in the Western Slope section of Jersey City.
Cars and rigs race out of the distorted industrial horizon. As they pass in unmonitored speed, their weighted gusts nearly blow a black tarpaulin off the mysterious figure positioned under a billboard. A panoramic background of darkened factory buildings, grease-soiled garages and discount motel shacks becomes freeze-framed and falls out of focus as the plastic cover flaps back – and I spot, all at once, the bronze visage of a 350-year-old Dutchman.
THE YARD OF CARVED STONES
After all vehicles have passed, there is a startling half-silence, a thinning echo-residue of engines. Until the next rattling round of rushing automobiles arrives — in mere seconds, for gleaming grills and mirrored windshields have already appeared out of the arching distance — the air will remain serene, undisturbed, unpunctured.
Momentary silence, I sense, becomes my summoning, my invitation to draw closer to a recently uprooted — and misunderstood — history.
I walk beyond a corroded front fence — the thunder of charging trucks has already returned — and enter a crowded yard of cut memorial tablets. Bobcats, flatbeds and dollies busily wiz around, lifting and loading heavy headstones for delivery to local cemeteries. My gaze goes past mazes of piled crates of sliced slabs, their glazed granite and onyx surfaces shimmering in the sun. Some are carved with penates; others are embedded with software-generated life portraits.
At the front rear of the yard, left alone, towering — the 8-foot-high alloyed sculpture, its malleable shroud flowing cape-like, its high-heeled leather-clogged foot and peg-studded wooden prosthesis leg visible under the high-watered tarp. A signature is etched right under the heel, which steps slightly off its ziggurating plinth: Massey Rhind Sculptor 1913.
The name of a pioneer sculptor, a genius of historical accuracy and dramatic poise who, a full century earlier, captured for Jersey City its one founding father: Peter Stuyvesant, lionhearted Director-General of the Dutch-held 17th century colony of New Netherland (which included fragments making up what is now Manhattan and the central cities of Hudson County) from 1647-1664.
“Peg-Leg Pete,” as they labeled him, in half-humored reference to the right leg he lost by cannon ball on a remote Caribbean island a decade before, immortalized in metal under witness of 5,000 spectators squeezed in front of P.S. No 11 School (rechristened the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School in 1969).
A primordial politician, city planner and peacekeeper, now tossed aside by elected officials, banished to the depressed outskirts of Tonnelle Avenue – and heralded, in winter cold, by a single visitor, pen and camera in hand.
A MISSING MONUMENT
Pointing my high-definition iPhone 4 lens up at the broad hat-brimmed head of the legend, I experience a cynical “only-in-Jersey-City” moment as I ponder how the monument was diamond saw-bladed down last year by Jersey City Board of Education decree – without, shockingly, public input or blessing – and hurried away here, its three historical-texted tablets apparently pulverized or lost in transit.
If this were Manhattan, I think to myself, where Stuyvesant, who died in 1672, is interred in dignity under an ancient stone chapel, and where streets, squares, parks, schools, housing projects and monuments have been reared and managed in his honor, his Stuyvesant statue would have never been dismantled in such a shameful manner.
How is it, I ask aloud in the again-silenced atmosphere, that our major historical monuments can be so misunderstood, mismanaged, moved, misplaced? Have we lost touch with our history so deeply that we decide recklessly on the erasure of landmarks without careful consideration, without respect?
I put my lens away and leave the yard, the cloaked Stuyvesant likeness shrinking as I walk slowly a few miles south along shallow Tonnelle Avenue sidewalks. The Route 1 & 9 speedway runs parallel and dangerously close, with almost no divide between road and pedestrian walkway. I risk it anyway: the infamous road, I know, will traverse Journal Square and lead me directly to the back door of the still-intact Bergen Square street grid at Tonnelle and Van Reypen Avenues, near the V.I.P. Diner.
It will take me past the stone 18th century Van Wagenen Homestead on Academy Street (more popularly known as the Apple Tree House), to a statue-less base fenced off inside the Bergen Avenue-fronting concrete courtyard of P.S. 11/Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School.
When I get there, I hold the cold bars of the metal barrier and start to piece together the missing monument’s origins under a boomeranging drove of pigeons and doves that call Bergen Square home. Behind me, buses wheeze at their stops and shoppers convene at mom-and-pop businesses, giving a rich pulse to the district heralded as the site of the first permanent European settlement in New Jersey.
Maybe that is the magic I sense at the locked school gate – the switch that turns on the years of an earlier century, bringing me back to the origins of what was stingingly lost in 2010.
DOMINION OF THE DUTCH
The idea of raising a Peter Stuyvesant monument was born out of an inner civic reflection – and the sudden alignment of certain historical stars.
In 1910, as it turned 250 years old, Bergen Square was largely the same pristine Dutch village that had been fortified with spiked wooden walls in 1660 at Stuyvesant’s insistence. On that seminal anniversary, Dutch descendants were found to be residing in the same sloped and gambrel roof homestead houses erected by their forebears, directly in the encroaching shadow of a skyscraper-rising Journal Square. The Dutch language and cultural traditions carried over from Holland in the mid-17th century could still be heard, still witnessed. The Dutch vernacular church and burial grounds were persistently there. Rudimentary village streets, laid out so many centuries before by Surveyor General Jacques Cortelyou, bore their pioneer names.
In 1910, the dominion of the Dutch was undying. Their noble names, living language and timeless architecture were stupendous sources of pride.
But the descendant families, headed by historian Daniel Van Winkle, desired something even more forceful, more direct and dominant: a majestic, eye-popping effigy, a central figural fount that would capture, in shaped metal and incised stone, the mystical essence of their lineal village.
Only a master sculptor, one with the same pioneering spirit of their predecessors, could carry out their edict, their call for Stuyvesant to be hoisted and forged from the oracular core of their heritage.
STAR SCULPTOR
Residents organized quickly and aligned themselves with resourceful partners. The fundraising efforts and final design and placement of the monument was to be decided by the Peter Stuyvesant Monument Committee (a force of over 70 members), a legislative arm of the powerful City Plan Commission, and a connected social alliance called the Bergen Monument Association.
A design competition was formally announced and drew immediate entries from the country’s top sculptors. The anticipated cost of the project, consisting of statue, base and excavation, was $15,000 and would be raised between 1910 and 1913 by popular subscription, including coins from local school children. Chaired by J. P. Landrine and the Rev. Dr. Cornelius Brett of the nearby Bergen Dutch Reformed Church, a parish deeply seeded in the 1660 village and still New Jersey’s oldest congregation, $5,000 was raised from public donations and $10,000 from Jersey City through Board of City Commissioners appropriations.
The pitched fever demonstrated by Jersey City for Peter Stuyvesant was spreading elsewhere: sculptors and muralists across the country were depicting the wood-legged legend in great works of stone, metal and oil inside newly minted Beaux-Arts-motived court houses, schools, post offices and other public spaces.
But the Bergen Square-sited statue competition, all knew, bore more prominence and prestige, Stuyvesant being its primeval planner – and because Bergen was still there, a municipal relic established by the subject himself.
This was, of all, the commission to acquire. Whosoever should craft the anticipated monument would be given a chance closeness with Stuyvesant’s spirit, it was deemed, and leave behind a work of true immortality.
The winning design was deliberated and chosen rather quickly. By the end of 1910, while the 250th anniversary Bergen celebrations were ongoing, sculptor J. Massey Rhind was chosen as the winning entrant.
His selection was almost predetermined. Throughout the process, the star sculptor had smartly advertised his impassioned historical research to committee members. His hulking 8-foot-high bronze portrait, he informed them, was based on a true-to-life painting hanging inside Manhattan’s City Hall – and, most integrally, his depiction of the Dutchman’s artificial limb was based on the original peg in the possession of direct Stuyvesant descendants.
Rhind’s resume was singular, extraordinary, envied: prodigious sculptor of all the allegorical reliefs at Grant’s Tomb, the North Astor Door at Trinity Church, the caryatids above Macy’s Department Store and the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial at Washington, D.C.
And he had, many remembered, crossed paths with Jersey City before, entering a design competition in 1897 for the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument at City Hall, losing only third place to his young contemporary, Philip Martiny.
But perhaps more on the mind of the committee was the now-lost fact that Rhind had once before looked the visage of Stuyvesant in the eye, literally bonding with the subject as only sculptor and poser (be it living or spectral) can.
A dozen years earlier, in 1898, Rhind struck a bronze Stuyvesant for the portico to the Exchange Court Building in Lower Manhattan. That version, now standing in a park in Kingston, New York, was utilitarian in comparison to the more dramatic Bergen Square rendition. It was, in a way, a preparatory sketch that anticipated the future. His Exchange Court Stuyvesant was based on untrustworthy pictures of Stuyvesant – but his 1910 Bergen execution, with the Director-General stepping out of the sculpting frame, the Bergen village charter clasped in one gloved hand and a carved walking stick in the other, was based on objects directly connected to Stuyvesant.
It was a sculptural resurrection not overlooked by the committee and probably the artistic enlightenment that Rhind – who hailed from a family of famous sculptors in Edinburgh, attended the prestigious Royal Scottish Academy as a 15-year-old prodigy and trained in Paris with the world famous Jules Dalou – had been searching for.
THE EXEDRA
His tall bronze statue, clad in full accurate Dutch attire, including a heavy cape that seems to sway in the breeze, was platformed on a 10-inch-high plinth and affixed to an 8-foot-high semi-circular exedra, or wayside seat, with a wingspan of 12 feet. The exedra, cut from a single gigantic boulder of granite, was caped at each curling end by Dutch seafaring reliefs. To help tell the tale, Rhind attached three historical text tablets inside the exedra’s recess, where resting residents could read about the former walled village’s founders and its place in history as the first permanent settlement in the state and site of the first school, church, court system, and waterworks. And to solidify Stuyvesant’s historical stature even more, the committee and Rhind decided to angle it at the entrance to the 1903 P.S. 11 school building so as to keep Stuyvesant constantly visible and at the forefront of the minds of young citizens.
Rhind presented Jersey City with a final bravura Stuyvesant titan based on multiple Renaissance mannerisms he was exposed to in his European training. The thespian flair and natural movement of the statue was a potent evocation of the design philosophy of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, an influential art and architecture school based in Paris. Rhind understood and adopted the Ecole’s edict that building and embellishment are one element and that true works of architecture and sculpture must be conservatively classical, grand in their presentation, and both realistic and allegorical.
Rhind was perhaps the first sculptor to carry the Ecoles influence over to America when he immigrated to New York in 1889. The American Renaissance, built on those very Parisian precepts (many prominent American architects had attended the school), was then emerging in major cities like New York and Chicago. In fact, it was Rhind who energized the sculptural program of the groundbreaking 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an amusement park-like event that featured the latest advancements in architectonic design and engineering, including steel frame construction and cladding that made monumental neo-classicism possible.
It was a Beaux-Arts craze that allowed artists like Rhind to run wild with the chisel and hammer, to compose larger-than-life monuments of allegorical and historical figures that would, they hoped, animate architecture and surpass the splendor and beauty of ancient Rome and Florence.
Rhind’s Stuyvesant may have been contextually Dutch, but his gladiator pose, falconer gloves and period chest straps made him seem allegorical and worthy of architectural flight.
THE STREET COMPASS
October 18, 1913, was entered into the storied Bergen annals as soon as it happened — and is the moment that comes most alive for me as I stand in front of the closed school yard.
800 people columned across the Bergen Avenue divide to ceremoniously outline the ancient village street compass — in front of 5,000 spectators. The spirited swell, consisting of grand marshals, fife and drum corps, boy scout brigades, school children choirs, regaled regiments, aging veterans and parish priests, all walked in unison along four 800-foot-long blocks – Tuers Avenue, Newkirk Street, Van Reypen Avenue and Vroom Street — and ending at the intersecting artery of Academy Street and Bergen Avenue where Acting Governor James F. Fielder awaited them at a pageant grandstand. City Commissioners A. Harry Moore and James J. Ferris and future mayor Frank Hague flanked Fielder as over 200 police details kept order below.
Octogenarian Daniel Van Winkle, president of the Hudson County Historical Society, presided and presented Peter Stuyvesant to the public, pulling back, according to a Hudson Reporter correspondent, a veil “in which the monument had been enshrouded, exposing for the first time the heroic figure of the old redoubtable Knickerbocker Governor.”
Devitalized and in ill health, the Rev. Dr. Brett was able to speak out over the crowd and conjure the earliest Dutch settlers: farmers and trappers who transcended two bloody wars with the Lenni Lenape natives, as well as a British invasion and takeover in 1664, thereby ending Stuyvesant’s rule, to lay the foundation of the future Jersey City.
He concluded by turning to A. Harry Moore, the youngest of the City Commissioners and future three-time New Jersey Governor, who accepted the monument on behalf of City Hall – the largest benefactor of the fundraising campaign – with the pronouncement that the monument was, from now forward, the prided property of Jersey City.
“This monument,” spoke Moore, “bringing as it does, memories of times and conditions which surely tried the very souls of men, should be an inspiration to us all and an ever-present reminder to our people that we are indeed citizens of no mean city. May it inspire within us of this day and generation a keener sense of our civic obligation and awaken a spirit which will make for a greater and grander Jersey City. And as the years go by, may each succeeding generation, gazing upon the features of this plain, honest and courageous Governor, catch a little of his spirit and diffuse it to the benefit of the Commonwealth and the advancement of its people.”
Rhind, hiding behind local dignitaries gathered on the bandstand, stood when summoned by speakers. But he said nothing. He merely bowed. His gaze reached out into the massed chorus and, coming back, rested on his cadmiumed creation. Perhaps he, the sculptor, sensed that his Stuyvesant would be unveiled to an appreciative public again, at another point in time.
Perhaps he knew that Stuyvesant, the tangible nexus of a nascent civilization, would literally be pulled from ashes to be conjoined, nearly 60 years later, with another legacy-maker.
LINKED LEADERS
In 1966, fire tried to erase the Peter Stuyvesant monument – almost reduced it to its molten state.
In the pre-dawn Monday morning hours of October 3, P.S. 11 School burned to the ground in a three-alarm fire that injured four firemen and displaced 750 students, teachers and administrators. Flames reached 100-feet in the blackening air. Sparks and cinders unleashed by exploding interior timbers rained down on Bergen Avenue and Academy Street. Soon whole wings in the school gave way, pulling the roof down into an inner implosion.
“The only part of the school that seemed to have emerged unscathed,” wrote The Jersey Journal, “was the green [bronze] statue of Peter Stuyvesant, which had stood in front of it. But although the statue was intact, there seemed to be an expression of not a little disfavor on the venerable man’s face…”
City and Board of Education officials called for a new P.S. 11 – but it had to be built, they insisted, outside of the Bergen Square grid, thereby ending the site’s legacy as a continual school ground since 1660.
Parents and students would not have it. They pressured Mayor Thomas Whelan to keep the site and, following history, erect a modern schoolhouse in its core – with a fully restored and returned Peter Stuyvesant monument.
On April 2, 1969, three years after the debilitating inferno (it was determined that four teenage boys had broken into the school and tossed books onto a stove range), the new school, designed by the local firm of Comparetto & Kenny, was dedicated and renamed in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, who had spoken in Jersey City twice before. A bronze robed bust of Dr. King, designed by famed Jersey City sculptor Archimedes Giacomantonio, was also unveiled inside the lobby.
Outside, the school cornerstone was blessed by the Most Rev. Martin W. Stanton, Auxiliary Bishop of Newark and pastor of St. Aeden’s Church, and capsuled with commemorative coins and documents by Mayor Whelan, Councilman Fred W. Martin, and Board of Education Commissioner Cornelius R. Parker, who is credited with the suggestion of renaming the new school in Dr. King’s honor.
In the far north corner of the new school’s pristinely paved courtyard, the semi-visible Peter Stuyvesant statue, buffed and polished, stood atop a redesigned base of concrete. The original exedra had been damaged during the reconstruction of the school and replaced by a plain vertical post, its sides glued with the three original text tablets.
Although no longer the centralized guardian of the school, the Stuyvesant monument maintained its eminence in the shade. The 1969 rededication program’s wording attested to its patrimonial value:
“This new building is the sixth school to stand on this historic site. The memory of its colonial beginnings is today presided over by the bronze representation of the strong and wise Governor Peter Stuyvesant…The presence of this statue will serve to remind us of the strength of the early settlers who were willing to give their allegiance to a new ruler while they continued in their peaceful pursuit of the good life.”
But the multi-paged program pointed out something even more startling on that day of dedications: the sharing of a precious historic site by two time-crossed legends, the forging of a transcendental link between two peacekeeping giants.
At that evocative April event, Peter Stuyvesant and Dr. King were merged into a single symbolic monument.
A THIRD DEDICATION
After the Stuyvesant statue was removed on a late Friday afternoon in February of last year – the excuse for removal was that space, of which there is plenty on the school lot, had to be made for a planned new, and as yet unfunded, Dr. King monument – a collective cry rang out in the preservation community.
The City of Jersey City, with Mayor Jerramiah Healy’s heeding, seemed to listen and reminded the Board of Education — as well as Hudson County Community College, which, in tandem with the Board, contracted to have the monument removed and eventually placed in its new private park right outside the Bergen Square district — that the monument was not theirs to touch, let alone dismantle and crate away.
J. Massey Rhind’s Peter Stuyvesant monument, it was announced at a city press conference, would be professionally restored by preservation consultants, conservation artisans and stone contractors — and placed back in front of the school, just as Rhind and the committee had arranged a full century before. A third ceremonial unveiling for the Stuyvesant statue has been promised for the future.
Hopefully it all happens. In Jersey City, historic preservation is hit-and-miss and often slowed and sidetracked by governmental bureaucracy, in spite of good intentions.
Until then, the cloaked figure on Tonnelle Avenue will continue to stand in silent petrifaction, the signatures of its creators chipping away in the vehicular wind.
Author’s Note: My sincere gratitude is extended to John Burns of Burns Brothers’ Memorials; John Hallanan, President of the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy; Ulana Zakalak of Zakalak Restoration Arts; Cynthia Harris and John Beekman of the The Jersey Room, Jersey City Free Public Library; and Planning Board Commissioner and photographer Leon Yost.
Editor’s Note: John Gomez is founder of the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy and holds a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from Columbia University. Email him at preservationtv@gmail.com and follow his preservation news network at www.twitter.com/preservationtv
With Valentine’s Day around the corner, this seems the proper moment to ask whether being in a relationship changes how you exercise and, perhaps even more intriguing, whether relationships affect how exercise changes you.
That latter possibility was memorably raised in an elegant series of experiments conducted not long ago at Princeton University. The researchers were trying to replicate earlier work in which the brains of mice given free access to running wheels subsequently fizzed with new brain cells, a process known as neurogenesis, and the mice performed better on rodent intelligence tests than those without access to wheels. To the Princeton researchers’ surprise, when they performed the same study with rats, “which are a little closer, physiologically, to humans,” said Alexis Stranahan, the lead author of the Princeton study, running did not lead to neurogenesis. The rats’ brains remained resolutely unaffected by exercise.
Hoping to discover why, the researchers examined how the rats and mice had been housed and learned that while the mice in the earlier experiments had lived in groups, the rats were kept in single-occupancy cages. Rats, in the wild, are gregarious. They like to be together. The researchers wondered whether isolation could somehow be undermining the cerebral benefits of exercise at a cellular level.
Putting this idea to the test, they divided young male rats into groups housed either in threes or singly and, after a week, gave half of them access to running wheels. All of these rats ran, but only the rats with cage mates experienced rapid and robust neurogenesis. Not until after weeks of running, long after the other socially engaged rats’ brains had sprouted plentiful new neurons and neural connections, did the lone rats start to produce brain cells. Social isolation had dramatically suppressed and slowed the process.
A recent follow-up experiment by scientists at the University of Houston produced similar results in female rats, which are even more sociable than males. Housed alone, the distaff rats experienced significantly less neurogenesis than female rodents with roommates, even though both groups ran similar distances on their wheels.
Why and how isolation affects exercise and neurogenesis remain somewhat mysterious, said Dr. Stranahan, now an assistant professor at Georgia Health Sciences University. But part of the cause almost certainly involves an excess of tension. “Exercise is a form of stress,” she pointed out. So is social isolation. Each, independently, induces the release of stress hormones (primarily corticosterone in rodents and cortisol in people). These hormones have been found, in multiple studies, to reduce neurogenesis. Except after exercise; then, despite increased levels of the hormones, neurogenesis booms. It’s possible, Dr. Stranahan said, that social connections provide a physiological buffer, a calming, that helps neurogenesis to proceed despite the stressful nature of exercise. Social isolation removes that protection and simultaneously pumps more stress hormones into the system, blunting exercise’s positive effects on brainpower.
Does this happen in lonely human exercisers? No one knows, Dr. Stranahan said, since comparable experiments on people are impossible. (The animals were sacrificed.) But she added, “There is abundant epidemiological literature in people that loneliness has cognitive consequences, contributing to depression, strokes, Alzheimer’s and so on.”
On the other hand, new science suggests that at least in people, close relationships may reduce how fit someone is. For a study published online in December, researchers cross-correlated data about the cardiovascular fitness and relationship status of 8,871 adults who had been tested several times over the years at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas. They found that single women who remained single also retained most of their fitness, while those who married tended to become less fit. Meanwhile, men who divorced became fitter; men who remarried often let themselves go. The authors speculated that divergent worries about appearance and desirability could have been motivating single people to work out and married couples to slack off. (No data was included about those insidious destroyers of workouts, children.)
Taken together, these otherwise varying studies of rodents and humans suggest that while exercise may seem a simple physical activity engaged in by individuals, it is not. It is in fact a behavior plaited with social and emotional concerns that can influence how often you work out and with what physiological consequences. It may take longer for lonely people to improve the state of their brains with exercise, Dr. Stranahan said, just as it may take a divorce to get some men in shape. But thankfully, there are some aspects of exercise and interpersonal relationships that remain stubbornly unambiguous. In a 2010 study from the Neuroscience Institute at Princeton, male rats given access to “sexually receptive” females enthusiastically engaged in procreative activity, a moderate workout in its own right and, despite raising their stress hormones, vigorously pumped up the amount of neurogenesis in their brains. Sex improved their ability to think, obvious jokes notwithstanding.
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