Downtown S.F. says adios to Occupy camp S.F. NEIGHBORHOODS

Jesse Hughes-MacArthur, 30 screams at SFPD officers during an unannounced midnight raid on the Occupy encampment at 101 Market Street in San Francisco, Calif., Wednesday, September 26, 2012. Jesse Hughes-MacArthur, 30 screams at SFPD officers during an unannounced midnight raid on the Occupy encampment at 101 Market Street in San Francisco, Calif., Wednesday, September 26, 2012. Photo: Jason Henry, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Jason Henry, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 42 Caption Close Downtown S.F. says adios to Occupy camp 1 / 42 Back to Gallery

Workers and residents along the lower end of Market Street breathed a collective sigh of relief Thursday when they woke up to find the trouble-riddled homeless camp in front of the Federal Reserve Bank building had been swept away overnight.

The block-long stretch of tents was the final vestige of last year's Occupy encampments, and it was cleared by a phalanx of police in a quick raid that began at 11:35 p.m. Wednesday. A few campers heeded warnings and left immediately, but 39 who didn't were arrested on charges of illegally lodging on the pavement.

Another camper was booked on a felony warrant, three more on misdemeanor warrants, and two juveniles were taken to a youth shelter, said San Francisco police Officer Albie Esparza.

A half-dozen activists showed up shortly after 1 a.m. to protest the arrests, but by then the mini-settlement was all but gone. Except for occasional screaming by some campers at the 70 assembled officers, the clearance went quietly and smoothly.

Police guarding area

By morning, those arrested without warrants were released after being cited and the former campground was surrounded by a bank-supplied wire fence and was being guarded by police, who plan to keep a presence for a while.

"It's about time the city got rid of them," said Kenny "Famous Wayne" Bowens, who runs a longtime shoeshine stand across the street. "They never messed with me, but it was bad for business, bad for the city, and it smelled bad."

He noted that the occasional presence of ragged homeless folks stands out in the forest of high-end restaurants, corporate fiefdoms and blue-suited workers that constitutes the city's Financial District. But the camp, he said, "just got to be too much."

Tina Partridge has walked by the camp every weekday to her job as a systems analyst, and she grinned broadly when she saw the pavement empty.

"The smell of urine and actually seeing feces on the sidewalk here was just disgusting," she said. "This is America and protest is good, but this was just a homeless camp."

Across the street Thursday afternoon, 19-year-old Dusti "Bubbles" Byers sat in a symbolic cage she made out of a hotel luggage carrier and yelled at the police standing guard. She said she had been homeless since age 11 and had been living at the camp for two months before being arrested with her fellow campers early Thursday morning.

"I am here to stand for something!" she screamed. "I am going to look you in the eyes!"

Retired schoolteacher Jane Kennedy, 74, demonstrated in front of the fencing, as she does many lunchtimes, with an Occupy-themed placard denouncing the multimillion-dollar salary of Wells Fargo Bank CEO John Stumpf.

"Absolutely this was a homeless camp," she said. "But don't you think it's necessary for us to bear witness to the bottom 1 percent of our country? Don't you think being in front of a big bank is the right place to bear that witness?"

Occupy's point eclipsed

Esparza said that in addition to the illegal lodging issue, the walkway had to be freed up by police because construction crews need to repair water leaks that are seeping into the basement of the Federal Reserve building. A bank spokeswoman said the work will take as long as a month.

"It went pretty smoothly," Esparza said of the raid.

The camp had been in front of the Federal Reserve since last fall, but in recent months had become more of an indigent camp than a center of protest against economic inequities, according to police, neighbors and several participants. Police visited the camp daily over the past week to warn occupants that they were illegally on the sidewalk and should leave.

City officials had abided the camp until recently on the grounds that it was an expression of free speech, but Esparza said that message had become lost in its transformation into an indigent hangout.

'It went down too fast'

A few dozen passers-by, neighbors and homeless people quietly watched the tents and Occupy-themed signs being dismantled after midnight, and most said they were glad to see it all disappear.

"This has been a very lame front for what they call Occupy," James Miller, 37, who lives nearby, said. "This was just a homeless encampment that the city has let exist for too long."

Nearly every night, he said, "they're up here until midnight or 1 a.m. drinking and using drugs, and then you hear the screams and fights start to happen. Yeah, it's a public space, but it should be a public space for everyone, not just them."

A few feet from him, 49-year-old Raul Delarosa, who helps handle media for the San Francisco Occupy movement and has stayed in the camp, vehemently disagreed.

"The police don't have a law to apply here, and the things said about our camp are not true," he said. "If people had known in advance about this raid, we could have had a lot more here to protest this. But it went down too fast."

Occupy plans presence

On Thursday afternoon, a half-dozen activists milled around the old campsite and said they intended to maintain an Occupy message in the area.

"We are planning a rally here soon, and we will have a presence here, but it will be different," said Mick O'Grady, who had often slept at the camp and has been an Occupy organizer since last fall. "I'll be honest, there were a lot of people at this camp doing a lot of crimes and a lot of drugs, and things are going to change.

"We want to be all inclusive, but when people are breaking the law and not here for a protest reason you are not an Occupier. The next protest site will not be tents, but an information site."