Katie Lorah is a planner and communication strategist at the intersection of advocacy and community organizing. She currently leads communications and marketing at Transportation Alternatives, NYC's nonprofit advocates for biking, walking, and public transit. Her previous work centered on digital civic engagement at ioby, and coastal resiliency at NYC Parks. She was a member of the Urban Design Forum's inaugural cohort of Forefront Fellows. Katie has a Master's in Urban Planning from MIT and a BA in journalism from NYU. She is currently parenting a two-year-old while working full time from home.

November 9, 2016: the day after the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Sixth street became ground zero for a roiling protest that seemed to spring straight from the collective id of a city knocked flat. New Yorkers poured from subways and office buildings, fueled by anger, grief, disbelief, and the drive to show what could only be shown collectively: the city’s wholesale rejection of the President-Elect. Their destination was Trump Tower, whose looming, opaque black glass stood in contrast to the small-d democratic human expression unfurling below. That day, Fifth Avenue became a new public space – packed with bodies, hashtagged, and forever changed in its city’s collective memory.

By the inauguration, the streets and sidewalks surrounding the tower were reconfigured as a makeshift security zone, whose impenetrability was indicated by Jersey barriers, the architecture of accidental permanence. Secret Service agents, heavily armed NYPD officers, and private security guards staffed checkpoints at the perimeter. Fifty-Sixth Street was indefinitely closed to traffic. Gawkers and selfie-takers, bearing middle fingers or red baseball caps, became as permanent a fixture of the streetscape as its lightposts. The street had transformed once again: in both physicality and meaning, it had left its ordinary state through a chaos defined by public sentiment, before being reclaimed as a security space, public in name only.

“The right of people from all parts of society to meet their fellow-citizens in the public space is a basic pillar of democracy.”

— Jan Gehl “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

— Donald Trump

New York’s street design is pragmatic above all else. A Manhattan street is a public place designed for function, not expression, for efficient commerce and egress, not specifically for public gathering. Fifth Avenue, one of New York City’s most identifiable public spaces, is not known as a palette for public dissent. Although it’s “bustling” — the most Manhattan of qualities — it’s less an agora than a utilitarian thoroughfare and a shopping district. In the mental map of the city, it’s most synonymous with high-caliber consumption, material desire, and upward-mobility tourism. What does it mean when such a narrow definition of “public” is blown up by mass protest, and then further narrowed through security protocol?



Before November 9: An increasingly private public space

As a public space in Midtown Manhattan, Fifth Avenue before November 2016 was far from simply “public.” Its five lanes of downtown-bound traffic are flanked by wide, sidewalks on which pedestrian traffic is heavy but commerce, from flashy advertising to sidewalk vending, is dominant. As is common in Midtown, the line between public and private space has long been blurred here. Sidewalk-adjacent public plazas can seem insincere attempts to accommodate theoretical gathering, while somewhat hidden Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) are tucked into the atriums of office towers. Both are nominally public concessions built by developers in exchange for a height variance, and they are typically treated as afterthoughts. The POPS within Trump Tower (whose context and meaning is expertly dissected by Karrie Jacobs in Architect Magazine) is a badly-marked labyrinth of atrium-level space with minimal seating, and often-closed balconies on higher floors. The poor signage and limited amenities of this space represent the rule, rather than the exception, for Midtown POPS.

This stretch of Fifth Avenue is one of the “great walks” of Manhattan; its intact streetwall, consistent activity and reliable spectacle make it a tourist attraction. It’s long been known as a destination for both window shopping and actual commerce. Both are transactional public activities, with private enterprise defining the parameters of expected and accepted behavior. Whether providing the entertainment or the actual goods, the department stores, chain stores, and boutiques of Fifth Avenue determine the primary use of the sidewalk. In summer months, some even open their doors and provide air-conditioning and music to the sidewalk, literally blurring the atmosphere between public and private. And this forefronting of the private sector is no accident: the Fifth Avenue BID has been working since the 1990s with more than 150 retailers to keep Fifth Avenue from 46th to 61st Street “clean, safe and welcoming,” provide “supplemental security and sanitation services,” and assist tourists along this commercial strip.

As is typical in high-value commercial districts, security and surveillance infrastructure are pervasive. Heavy concrete planter barriers and bollards delineate property lines and define street-level public plazas. A line of barrier planters has stood outside Trump Tower for more than a decade. The district has a visible police presence, including regularly-placed NYPD officers directing traffic. The Fifth Avenue BID employs “Community Safety Officers,” private security staff who double as tourist ambassadors and provide an additional visual symbol of public security. When the officers first hit the street in 1993, then-Mayor Giuliani called it “emblematic of the type of public/private cooperation that yields a win-win-win situation. Communities win, businesses win, all New Yorkers win.”

The omnipresence of surveillance cameras, though a visible and expected aspect of public urban life, is more difficult to quantify. New York City does not publish the number or location of public or private cameras, although according to most experts, it has risen dramatically in the past two decades. A study by the New York Surveillance Camera Project estimated that visible surveillance cameras on Fifth Avenue in Midtown more than quadrupled in just the year and a half following the September 11 attacks. The New York Civil Liberties Union found that the percentage of surveillance cameras in public spaces in New York rose by 443 percent from 1998 to 2010, and has counted more than 2,400 known public cameras in Manhattan alone. London, which does make its numbers public, has more than 500,000. Speaking on the increasing pervasiveness of both mounted and drone-based surveillance cameras, Mayor Michael Bloomberg told the Daily News in 2013, “We’re going to have more visibility and less privacy. I don’t see how you stop that.” For many New Yorkers, assumed surveillance is increasingly a fact of public life, and a small price to pay for security.

November 9: Emergence of the unruly Fifth Avenue

Even before the 2016 election, the public street and sidewalks of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Sixth Streets had grown in symbolic significance in the city’s consciousness. Small but fierce flash-protests, organized largely through Twitter and Facebook, had become increasingly frequent during the campaign. Anonymous organizers of actions such as the October 16 “blockade” by women protesting Trump over recently-leaked admissions of sexual assault, mobilized, publicized, and documented their actions through Twitter personas such as @PussyGrabsBack (joined October 2016).

Taking a page from leaderless, social media-driven movements such as the Arab Spring and Occupy, these actions seemed to focus not on getting tens of thousands of participants, but on mobilizing as quickly as possible and disseminating information in real time to affect the news cycle. In effect, these 21st century tactics take an expanded view of the public realm, and public protest, considering online space an equally crucial front for resistance. A meaningful protest movement, it seemed, didn’t require a lot of bodies in the street, but did require a lot of eyeballs.

In the weeks leading up to the election, with more than 90% of Manhattan voters planning on pulling the lever for Hillary Clinton, a Trump victory seemed like a remote and unserious possibility. While NYPD and private security presence had been ramped up at the tower in the final weeks of the campaign, there had been little public or media discussion of the possible impact of four years of Secret Service-level security on either public space or the city’s budget. The inconvenience of security infrastructure on Fifth Avenue appeared temporary, and New Yorkers were used to temporary inconveniences.

It is difficult to overstate the shock felt in New York on the evening of November 8. That evening, much of the real-time initial reaction – the disbelief, the desperate calculations, the anger — took place on social media, our most immediate public realm. But November 9, a cold and rainy day, brought the online reaction into physical space, as waves of protestors headed to Fifth Avenue. The thousands of participants in the first post-election protests had not planned, scheduled, or permitted their participation. Facebook events had been hastily created early Wednesday morning, and many saw images of the growing crowd on Twitter before heading out. Others just knew they would not be alone if they went. The public space at Fifth and Fifty-Sixth had taken on a new urgency overnight; the map of Manhattan in the city’s collective consciousness had undergone a shocking update.

Even outside the current reality that crowd-size estimates equate to political clout, it’s difficult to quantify the number of protestors outside of Trump Tower in the two days following the election. Estimates generally range in the several-thousands in Manhattan. Similar unplanned, unpermitted, fast-breaking mobilizations occurred in cities across the country, and around the world. Much like the Women’s Marches and airport protests that followed in January, these distributed protests’ simultaneousness and unified imagery, made possible by social media, were a source of strength for participants.

For twenty-four hours, Fifth Avenue was uncharacteristically unruly. The Trump Tower protests were self-organized, spontaneous, un-permitted, and emotionally charged. Although largely peaceful, sixty-five protestors were arrested on November 9, on charges including “disorderly conduct” and “blocking vehicular traffic.” However, at a certain point in the evening, the NYPD, a police force well-versed in crowd control, seemed to give in to the crush of protestors determined to occupy space outside the Tower, and as long as they remained peaceful, made few attempts to control their flow.

The snapshot of Fifth Avenue immediately following the election was as genuine a public expression of the right to public space as is possible in a highly-securitized, heavily surveilled and psuedo-privatized environment like Midtown Manhattan. The frequent speculation about whether we’re entering a “new era of perpetual protest” is often rendered in optimistic surprise; but what are our public spaces for if not for democratic expression? And does the fact that this expression, in public space, seems so anomalous indicate how far our public spaces have drifted from their purpose?

A few weeks later: Barriers up

By the end of November, the bulk of the initially-visible public outpouring of anguish had moved from Trump Tower to a more recognizable twenty-first century agora: the internet. The resistance took on other forms besides bodies in the street. Larger, more organized actions, such as the Women’s March, were planned. Estimates were assembled regarding the cost to the city of securing Trump Tower for the next four years. Mayor Bill de Blasio feuded with Trump in the tabloids about this cost. The President-elect did little to ingratiate himself to those who had shown up to protest his election, his fellow New Yorkers.

Meanwhile, several rows of metal pedestrian barriers went up around Trump Tower, essentially privatizing the sidewalk. 56th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues was entirely closed to traffic, and security checkpoint booths appeared at the intersections behind high-speed crash barriers. Three traffic lanes were barricaded off, two for a security buffer and one across the street for a semi-permanent pen for journalists and photographers keeping tabs on visitors to the tower. The new “temporary” security infrastructure invoked permanence in the same fashion as much of Lower Manhattan following September 11. New Yorkers seemed to know what to expect, and the loss of a small sliver of public space in an already questionably-public district seemed to pale in comparison to fears of what the new administration would bring.

Physical public space restrictions aside, the site continued to feature significantly in the city’s collective self image. As the Trump name was being removed from the residential towers on Riverside Drive across town, commercial tenants in Trump Tower and adjacent buildings complained of a drastic decline in foot traffic and a drop in sales. Mayor de Blasio was quoted in the press as saying “I will not tell you that Gucci and Tiffany are my central concerns in life.” However clumsy, this sentiment is telling in its opposition to the fundamental identity of Fifth Avenue, a place that has been more or less defined by high-value commerce.

Also, by the end of Trump Tower had developed its own online persona. Geotagged Instagram posts from the tower contained hundreds of individual expressions of on-location disdain, far outnumbering positive imagery of the location. The raising of a middle finger at a skyscraper might only last a moment in physical space, but its online life is long. In late November, an online “vandal” changed the building’s name in Google Maps to Dump Tower. But the barriers remained up, the visible opposition on-location continued to dwindle, and commuters learned to avoid the security snag as if it were any other obstacle to New York efficiency.

Whose streets?

Public space carries within it a fundamental tension. On one hand it requires predictability to function. Collective orderliness is the assumption that allows us all to surround ourselves with strangers, to commute on transit, to live and to work stacked floor upon floor, to consume at a steady rate without running out of things to consume. Yet on the other hand, by definition public space invites some degree of chaos. People are unpredictable, and public spaces can be visible showcases for the chaos and expression that makes us human.

We are constitutionally granted freedom of assembly, but street design, visible security and surveillance, public-private management agreements, collective memory, and social norms can all contribute to that freedom being exercised infrequently. In order to satisfy egress and commerce, Fifth Avenue, and other commerce-oriented public spaces require that human unpredictability be kept to a minimum. Fifth Avenue was never intended for mass demonstrations. It’s not a marketplace of ideas, it’s a marketplace, and it evidently takes a global-scale systemic shock like November 8 to shift that ingrained identity, even for a few days.

If we are indeed headed into a new era of mass demonstration, what does that mean for public space? For one thing, the era is likely to be defined by an uneasy and quickly evolving hybrid of online and offline mobilization that will be impossible to accommodate with public space design alone. Rather than Fifth Avenue, the spontaneous immigration ban protests at airports nationwide are perhaps a truer manifestation of this new kind of public assembly. They did not take place in traditional, designated public gathering spaces. Diffuse, immediate, reactionary and viral, it was their speed, their number, and their imageability that made them powerful. It’s difficult to imagine this power coming from a demonstration in even the most thoughtfully-designed public plaza.

If there is a silver lining to the decades-long trend of encroachment on public space of security, surveillance and commercial infrastructure like that surrounding Trump Tower, it’s that our definition of public spaces is broadening beyond the physical to the virtual and the temporal. The tower may now lay claim to some additional real estate, but public expression can now organize in a flash, multiply with a click, and live in a collective memory supported by digital connection.