Under the tree where the International Society for Krishna Consciousness was founded in 1966, on the south side of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, sixty or so people are gathered in a circle around a yellow banner that reads, in blue spray paint, “general assembly of nyc.” It is Saturday, August 13, 2011, the third of the General Assembly’s evening meetings.

“No cops or reporters,” someone decrees at the start of the meeting. Others demand a ban on photographs.

From where I’m sitting in the back, my hand inches up, and I stand and explain that I am...

When night fell on September 17, the Financial District had that feeling of loneliness about it again, of lifeless towers, of quiet. Th is night, though, it was at least somewhat less unoccupied.

One or two hundred people were huddled in circles, scattered around Zuccotti Park’s stone floor. A little before 10 p.m., more than twenty empty police vans passed by them on Broadway in a solemn line, their flashing lights lighting up the empty buildings above. Soon, on that narrow end of the park, there formed two rows of officers with clubs drawn and plastic white handcuffs dangling from...

There was this moment, while I was standing on the steps of the New York County Supreme Court building overlooking Foley Square, when things came together right in front of me. It was October 5, the day of the first big march when organized labor turned out in support of Occupy Wall Street. A few thousand union members, students, and allies were rallying in the square when a few thousand marchers from Liberty Square poured in from the north end on Worth Street. They kept coming, riverlike, and it seemed as if they’d never stop.

In the union crowd, people...

If there was one apotheosis of Occupy Wall Street atop all the others, surely it was the early morning of October 14, just before dawn. A few days earlier, Mayor Bloomberg had made a surprise visit to the occupation to announce that the park needed to be cleaned. Police would help clear it in stages to allow sanitation workers to come through. Not coincidentally, the cleaning was to be on the eve of the global day of action planned for October 15, first called for months earlier by the Indignados in Spain, but now poised to be a worldwide coming-out...

All things must come to an end, but not necessarily like this.

When the sun rose on November 15, Liberty Square looked an awful lot like Zuccotti Park again—aside from the damaged flower beds and a broken plastic peace sign lying in the gutter. It was blocked off with barricades even though there’d been a court order that people should be allowed to return. The place had been completely cleared and power-washed, bare and dead except for the trees, whose leaves had turned a bright yellow for autumn. I don’t think I noticed that they’d turned before; there was...

Protest in 2012 was no longer so legal as it had been in 2011. On New Year’s Eve, President Obama signed into law the latest National Defense Authorization Act, which included new powers for indefinitely detaining U.S. citizens, and on March 9, he would sign the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act, which heightened penalties and limits for protests near Secret Service–protected people or events “of national significance.” To add insult to injury, on April 9, the Supreme Court went on to rule that invasive strip searches were permissible for any arrest, no matter what the cause.

Occupy...

“I’m totally in love with the general strike,” said Jerry Goralnick, a middle-aged artist and actor, at a Sunday afternoon visioning meeting about what the Direct Action Working Group’s priorities would be in the coming year. It was January 8, and by then Occupy Wall Street’s die-hard meeting goers could think of little else than the strike. He understood the impulse, but it made him nervous; his experience in the 1960s had taught him the allure of the unattainable as well as its fallout.

“To me,” he said, “it’s analogous to seeing the face of God.”

The idea of a...

At the corner of Spring and Varick Streets, in the ethereal white halls of a Manhattan Mini Storage, two members of the Occupy Wall Street Archives Working Group assembled competing visions of how the movement should be remembered. Their collections looked deceptively similar: cramped, high-ceilinged closets packed with cardboard signs, boxes, banners, and stray objects such as a mannequin, a pig mask, a miniature tent, an orange mesh police net, and hundreds of unopened letters. Neither self-appointed archivist had access to the other’s stash. They rarely even spoke to each other, having undergone a philosophical falling-out—one that, as the...