Occupy Wall Street Re-Occupies Zuccotti Park

Protesters surged into Zuccotti Park Tuesday night shortly after its owner, Brookfield Office Properties, quietly removed barriers that had been restricting access since police removed the encampment there in November. Some trappings of the previous encampment have already sprung up, but police enforcing the rules governing park behavior seem to have gotten even more strict in the absence of the physical barriers. The barriers had surrounded the park, with police restricting who came in and out through two entrances. Village Voice reported that on Tuesday, "Two protesters were arrested for sitting on benches behind the stacked barriers, but after a dozen more replaced them, the police stopped trying to keep occupiers away from the area." A tweet from the account @uneditedcamera referred to a "no padd[ed] sitting order" that police were apparently enforcing. Occupy's own Twitter stream said Brookfield was asking police to enforce a rule against lying down if they did so on cardboard. But one rule that's been eased is the ban on food in the park. And with that, it sounds like the Zuccotti encampment is creeping back. According to The Voice, "Within an hour of the removal of the barriers, the kitchen working group was serving hot food to all who wanted it, protesters were making and arranging cardboard signs, and the Occupy Wall Street library was slowly being reassembled, cartload by cartload."

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Meg Robertson, an MSNBC digital producer, shared this photo on Flickr of the first tent to go up in the newly reopened park:

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