Protest in the Park? Showdown Is Tomorrow

By JIM DWYER

After months of legal dickering, the city’s elaborate plans to steer antiwar protesters away from Central Park will be tested tomorrow by what is widely expected to be one of the city’s largest political demonstrations in decades.

Although the main protest group, United for Peace and Justice, failed to win a city permit to hold a formal rally on the park’s Great Lawn, it remains the ult`imate destination for many participants in the march, which some organizers believe could draw up to 250,000 people. The city is equally determined to keep mass demonstrations off the park’s grass, and the struggle for the moral high ground will set the tone for a week of political theater inside and out of the Republican convention.

The city has created a route, agreed to by the organizers, that involves a giant U-turn for the marchers, who will go from Union Square to Madison Square Garden and back. The organizers have asked the participants to complete the route, even though by returning downtown they will go a mile in the opposite direction from Central Park.

After the march is over, the protesters will eventually be able to make their way uptown to the park, the organizers say. City officials say there is nothing to stop people who are abiding by the law from going there - once they have moved out of the parade route’s frozen zones.

The stakes are high for the protesters, for both national political parties, and for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

It is a near certainty that police commanders will have to adjust their crowd-control plans, depending on the movements of large numbers of people, said John F. Timoney, the chief of police in Miami and a former first deputy police commissioner in New York.

"The city cannot have a pitched battle the day before the convention," Chief Timoney said. "You cannot have cops billy-clubbing protesters on the 6 o’clock news."

Helen McMahon, a retired I.B.M. employee who lives in Greenwich Village, said that she would decide at the march about making the trek to Central Park.

"I will test the crowd," she said. Members of her group at the McBurney Y.M.C.A. will be taking part. "Also, half the people in my exercise class for active older adults are going," she said. "I belong to another senior group, but most of them are not able to walk."

Ms. McMahon was among tens of thousands of people who could not get through to an antiwar rally on the East Side of Manhattan on Feb. 15, 2003, a frigid Saturday. Crowds packed First Avenue from 49th Street to as far north as 76th Street - half a million people, the organizers said, while the Police Department estimated it was about 100,000.

Many of those arriving for that demonstration, including Ms. McMahon, were sent uptown by police officers along Second and Third Avenues, and many found themselves penned in, unable to move in any direction.

The 2003 rally, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, had drawn a wide spectrum of people from the metropolitan area, including many who had never been to a mass protest, and some believed that the police tactics were intended to keep them from attending the rally.

At the time, a spokesman for the Police Department said that there was no intention to keep people from getting to the rally, but that the organizers had not provided enough marshals, and that the police officers were trying to control the number of people feeding in from the side streets to avoid dangerous overcrowding on First Avenue.

Tomorrow’s parade will also involve a long diversion from the ultimate - if unofficial - destination. Conor Clarke, a college student who tried to reach last year’s protest, said that the city again seemed to be making matters difficult by denying a permit for Central Park, which he saw as a sensible site for the protest. "I think the city is playing hardball, in sort of a nonrational way," he said.

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said that the gates to the park would remain open. After marchers move south on Fifth Avenue and reach 32nd Street, they will be able to leave the route and walk to Madison Avenue, Mr. Browne said. They will not be allowed to walk on the roadways.

"We are not going to permit another en masse march to the park - you can’t take over the streets without a permit," he said. "If people are walking on the sidewalk and not otherwise breaking the law, they can walk in any direction they want."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/28/politics/campaign/28park.html