Dewey Square after the Dec. 10 eviction of Occupy Boston Boston's Dewey Square on Dec. 9, as some occupiers evacuated and other drew together in preparation for eviction The view from inside Occupy Boston's Sacred Space, an interfaith chapel inside of a tent. Protestors prayed here up until the eviction. One of the last artifacts remaining on the Sacred Space's shrine was a replica an occupier had made of the account of a fictional prisoner in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, the origin of the Guy Fawkes mask used by Anonymous and OWS. Austin Smith, 24, mans the medical tent nine days before eviction, when Occupy Boston was still protected by court order. A calm evening at Occupy Boston, a week before they lost the court order that protected their protest village in Boston's Dewey Square The tent city was quickly torn apart, and police and sanitation piled the remains against the sidewalk of Dewey Square. Robin Jacks, front, stands against the police line at Dewey Square and tweets the ongoing eviction and arrests of Occupy Boston. In the last hours before the Dewey Square eviction, supporters came down to celebrate and grieve with the occupiers.

At 5 a.m. on Dec. 10, 72 days into the occupation of Dewey Square, Occupy Boston’s little village of tents and pallets was erased.

Just before its disappearance, Occupy Boston was the oldest and largest of the remaining Occupy protests that have, since September, not only changed the geography of American parks in hundreds of towns and cities around America, but the Americans’ political and social dialogue.

[bug id=”occupy”]Whatever you think of Occupy Wall Street’s tactics, methods or politics, one thing is indisputable: the Occupy Wall Street movement makes people emotional. Even after wading through confusion to understand how Occupy actually works, people tend to love it or hate it.

And Boston is an emotional city. More than any Occupy I visited, passersby would scream and honk in support and derision many times a day.

Courtney Stanton, a 30-year-old project manager who worked at a software firm on the 20th floor of the Boston Federal Reserve building next to the park, was in the love category. She had a bird’s eye view of the protest, though her first visit came just as the camp prepared for its end.

“The window by my cube overlooks the Greenway. So, when I lean outside I can push my face against the glass, I’m looking right on Dewey Square,” Stanton said.

She’s watched Occupy Boston from day one.

“I always really liked that it was there,” Stanton said, as we sat in South Station, a major Boston train and bus commuting hub across the street from the Occupy. “I feel really strongly about people being able to peacefully organize and peacefully protest. [The Occupy] made visible especially a lot of problems that are already in Boston. It’s a space where that’s allowed to exist. I’m really sad to see it go away, because now it dismantles all of these individuals who together represent a systemic problem and it makes easy to dismiss them again as just individuals with problems.”

While the Occupy didn’t disrupt life in the Fed, it was impossible to ignore.

“Any time they were having any kind of group meet up that required the people’s mic, you could hear that 20 stories up, just hearing these weird little echos,” she said. “Because we all walk past it or see it every day, it automatically makes everybody talk.”

Stanton thought and talked a lot about political issues while the Occupy camped on her doorstep, and about how she’s had to help more and more of her family as the economy has turned worse.

“I don’t think that some people have a lot left. I mean, we tried voting. It’s kind of hard when they can buy all your politicians. It doesn’t really matter. I think for a lot of people who feel that the two-party process is breaking down, what are you going to do? Are you going to try to find an independent candidate who’s never even going to get funding?” Stanton said, “Or are you going to sit on a street and exist and insist that people see you?”

But the people who love Occupy Boston, and hate it the most, are the occupiers themselves.

Austin Smith was a medic with the Occupy since the night of the first eviction.

“[There were] a lot of the divides that were already on the street. People who use IV drugs versus people who don’t. People who’ve been sober versus people who aren’t. It’s very easy to kick the can down, ‘I’m better than this, I’m better than that,'” he said, referring to the hierarchies of dignity that divide the poor and troubled in Boston.

“But we managed to get away from that. Slowly, one person at a time, one step at a time, it was an ugly process…. It was a matter of certain people being assertive about not allowing certain language. Not throwing the word ‘junkie’ around all the time. Just checking people on the way that they were speaking.”

Occupations don’t come together because they are the best and brightest. Some of the best and brightest are there, but the camps are also full of the indigent, the addicted, the damaged, those forgotten by society. They come for food and safety, but they stay for the sense of agency. Everyone has a voice in the Occupy, anyone can speak up at the GA.

“I go back and forth, sometimes I just love it, it’s the most amazing place ever,” said Robin Jacks, one of the founders of Occupy Boston. “And then we’ll have times when no one is here, the only people here are the addicts that aren’t activists, and they just destroy things. To see something that I worked so hard on disrespected and used for something else is frustrating.”

A Temporary Restraining Order

Occupy Boston was the first camp to seek and get legal protection from a court that kept police at bay and let them develop an encampment that pointed to what the Occupy Movement may come to mean. It was as much a place where people groped for community as they spent time protesting for social and political change. In just over two months, the leaderless and inclusive Occupy became a new way of being in the world for its participants.

But on Dec. 7, Occupy Boston lost the restraining order that had been protecting them since Nov. 15, as the court ruled their protest encampment wasn’t protected by the First Amendment. They received their eviction notice the next day, with police coming through the camp and telling people they had until midnight to clear out.

Around a thousand people poured into the camp to support the Occupy, and midnight came and went with only an elevated police presence. Marching bands marched and people danced. Occupiers closed the adjacent street, and even put tents in it for a time, before returning to the park.

But many people packed up and left rather than face the inevitable. The pallet sidewalks were dismantled, then rebuilt by others. Their statue of Gandhi was moved around several times as people tried to find the best place for him to be when the police came. A moving van helped some of the occupiers move their precious things away. The remaining tents and their occupants pulled in tighter and they stayed closer in the cold Boston night, awaiting the inevitable, after the partiers had departed.

The nation’s other major encampments had already fallen to similar police evictions: from Oakland, Portland, and Los Angeles to Zuccotti in New York, Philadelphia and New Orleans. Many dozens of smaller camps remain around the United States, and two larger encampments still stand, preparing for the winter, in Washington, D.C.

But as winter deepens and evictions pile up, the Occupy Wall Street movement faces a dark season for discontent. And with the eviction of Boston, it lost one of its most vibrant outposts in America.

In The Beginning

Jacks, 31, said she got involved in Boston because not everyone could just drop everything and go to New York and people want to be active locally.

It started with some public discussion on Twitter with three others, but then they were encouraged and amplified by participants of Anonymous.

“We thought 10 or 20 people would show up, and it turned out to be about 300 people just for a first planning [General Assembly],” said Jacks. “We did so much planning to go into that meeting, and it didn’t matter, because everyone else did too. Everyone came there to work.”

Before long Occupy Boston became a little city in itself, filling up the space in Dewey Square, the bit of Boston’s greenway that sits across the street from Boston’s Fed. They expanded to another part of the greenway; police quickly and violently evicted the new encampment in an action that shocked onlookers around the world, though it would soon be eclipsed by the images of the Oakland clashes.

Life in Dewey Square went on. Many of the indigent and neglected of the Boston landscape moved into the encampment. They were taken in, but it was never an easy arrangement.

Like other encampments, Occupy Boston began to undergo a transition in response to the neglected issues of its city. Being in a place and not just a temporary march with a designated beginning and ending, the occupies became of their place. That made it inevitable that each city’s shame would move into the city’s Occupy.

That shame — whether homelessness in LA or youth violence in Oakland, or in the case of Boston, rampant untreated addiction — became the focus of national media attention, after so many years and so many mayors sweeping their forgotten and despised under their particular municipal rug.

Two main facets emerged at Occupy Boston, as with most of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

There’s the familiar message about economic justice, the idea that resources shouldn’t be so uneven, and no one should be left completely without — the rhetoric of the 99 percent. Less well understood was the desire for social cohesion. The Occupys are communities that come together simply from people needing a community.

That might seem a shallow need, but after repeated police actions, after cold, conflict, and societal hostility, that turned out to be the need so strong that people are willing to put their money, health, and sometimes even lives on the line, just to have a voice in something larger than themselves. Instead of throwing out society’s lost souls, the Occupations let them stay, take the people’s mic, volunteer, fail, get back up, fail again.

So it was that the medic tent at Boston became a social services hub, getting an uncounted litany of people into rehabs, shelters and medical care.

Volunteer medics like Smith, registered nurses and even doctors spent their spare time changing catheter bags on old men, and let young rape victims cry on the medical cots, calmly telling these girls it wasn’t their fault. Then some of the old men and young girls would take their own shifts. For Smith, there was no doubt the protest side of Occupy and the social service side needed each other.

“I think they are entirely interrelated,” he said, sitting on a bench outside the Boston Fed a few hours before dawn on the Dec. 10. “A lot of the people talk about the fact that we are doing a lot of social services and see that as a bad thing. That we’re attracting what they see as undesirables, and that it’s hurting the movement. As far as I’m concerned they have revolution fetishism. You can’t set up an open inclusive society and decide that you’re not going to be inclusive of some people because it’s harming your goal of having a better inclusive society.”

He stared into the middle distance, a slim figure dressed in all black with crosses of red duct tape to mark him as a medic.

“If you can’t address those basic but very complex problems, begin to address them in a way that’s not coarse, that’s not intolerant, then you’ve already lost,” he said. He took many long pauses as he spoke. We both knew there were only hours left.

The Messy Job of Finding a Purpose

Many people who had drifted in and become part of the movement have done nothing for years beyond reacting to the threats generated by a world that’s made it clear they aren’t wanted.

They are America’s invisible and often uncounted poor, in spirit as well as money. Not always street people, they are often unhoused, chronic couch-surfers and occasional street dwellers, hanging stubbornly off the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder. The occupations are a refuge for them, but more from non-existence than from danger. The Occupy became a safe place to admit everything in America was not ok.

Living at Occupy Boston, I remembered that life in innercity America is much harder than anyone wants to talk about. That’s the point of the Occupy, and what’s scary about it. The Occupy movement is often about stuff not many of us have wanted to admit for a while. On many nights, in many Occupations, people did bad things. People got hurt. For a time, Occupy Boston even had two confirmed Level 3 sex offenders in it. It had violent, mentally ill people who threatened each other with knives. There was no easy fix, but people weren’t giving up.

“I think we were all making progress here,” said Smith. “The difference between this model and a lot of existing social services is that it allows individual liberation. That you can become a participant, you can provide for others.” Indeed, many of Occupy Boston’s hard workers were addicts struggling on the edge of relapse, or sometimes using, even as they took on responsibilities around the occupation.

“I think that being a participant is so integral to healing, that just starting no matter where you are, going and doing the dishes at the food tent immediately helps, immediately starts people moving,” said Smith.

Smith himself had been transformed the night of the first raid. A clean-cut 24-year-old paralegal, he hints at something dark and painful in his past — that he wasn’t unfamiliar with the kind of suffering he dealt with calmly in his days at Occupy Boston.

Something he has a hard time describing catalyzed the night of the first eviction. He was standing with a partner in the Greenway Park as police moved in (in some protests that could end in arrests or violence, people are advised to have a “partner,” so they can keep track of the other person).

The announcement came that the assembly was illegal, and he and his partner glanced at each other, deciding wordlessly to stay.

“The officer came a couple of inches from our face and said screaming, ‘You need to leave now, you will be arrested,'” he said.

He watched his partner.

“She just locked up into something that was halfway between a soldier at attention and a sexual assault survivor going catatonic.” He knew he would stay with her, though he never knew her name. “I saw a lot of people overcoming their fears together. The police were almost a edifice for everyone’s collective fear. It was incredibly powerful to see.”

He groped for the word that describes what he found that night.

“Defiance,” he said, but defiance together rather than individually. “People are wired for solidarity.”

Since then the camp grew and changed. They sought, and for a moment got, legal protection. They fed thousands, got in fights, got arrested and released, tried to rush in a sink and manage drug addicts, they came to call each other brother and sister.

“It’s the joyful fearlessness of the entire endeavor, says Smith. “The almost dizzying amount of possibilities. There really is a sense that with this group of people that there’s nothing that you can’t accomplish. That any project, any crazy idea, with the process, you can implement it whether it is something physical in the camp or whether it’s a march, whether it’s just educating each other. Because,” he explains by way of one unlikely example, “the union iron workers are learning about transgender rights.”

Stanton, the software manager, never participated in the Occupy; she only sat near it. But like the occupiers, she couldn’t fight back emotions about their impending removal.

“You look at the way these things are structured, and these are people who the system is trying to tell them that they have failed or should fail. They’re still doing something, and they’re doing a lot more than a lot of supposedly successful people like me can do,” she said. “I really admired that. It was great to just be so close to that, and see that every day…. I worry about what that’s going to be like when we don’t have these public, active, living reminders anymore of all the things that are going wrong in this country.”

The End of Their Beginning

At 5 a.m. on Dec. 10, 72 days into the occupation of Dewey Square, Occupy Boston’s little village of tents and pallets was erased.

Or to put it another way, as people drifted away from camp and off to sleep in the early Saturday morning, it all came to an end.

“Police swarmed in so quickly, hundreds and hundreds of them,” said an occupier who went by Seth. “It went so fast.” The police gave people the option of gathering their personal belongings and fleeing the camp, but if they stayed, their belongings were thrown away, and they were arrested.

“They swept everything, cleared everything up and started dismantling and throwing everything into garbage trucks,” said Seth.

The camp was reduced to rubble within minutes, and much of that was stacked against the street. This created a barrier reinforced by the police, for occupiers and press, who were not allowed to observe the arrests that went on in the area where Occupy Boston had held its GAs. Trucks behind us in the early morning dark brought the barricades that have become ubiquitous ringing the landscape of the post-eviction parks dotting America. A tired group of press and occupiers watched from a distance, trying to make out in the dark how arrests were going.

John Ford, long involved with the camp and one of the librarians, stood to the side, mostly not watching, his face stiff and sad. Others, like Robin Jacks, still one of Occupy Boston’s main tweeters, were up at the police line, talking to press, sometimes arguing with police, who rarely argued back.

Ford, suddenly, silently, ran for the barrier. He vaulted himself over, and with a sudden surge of police behind him, made for the back of the police transport vehicles that his fellow occupiers were being put into. He was swallowed into the tight crowd of police and arrestees and vanished from sight. Jacks, her face tear-streaked, followed him over a few minutes later, but returned, escorted by police back to the outside of the line. Smith looked on as two of his fellow medics were arrested, his face blank under the slowly lightening sky. Seth paced the line, and dressed in a nice suit donned for an earlier, unrelated event, managed to pass back and forth beyond the police line several times during the evening.

When the arrests were completed, police forced us back so that workers could empty the park and ring it with barricades. City workers power-washed every hard surface of Dewey, removing any trace of the tiny city that had lived there.

“We had two fantastic nights of celebrating, of peace and fun,” Seth said, speaking of the support that came in after word of the eviction notice went out. “I’m pretty glad we got to do that…. It mostly came to an end pretty peacefully.”

He sat down with a coffee and bagel in South Station, surrounded by occupiers in various states, sleeping with their heads on café tables, sitting alone or in tight groups on the floor, mostly nursing coffees and oblivious to the weekend traffic starting to swarm around them.

He speaks about how the Occupy broke him out of his own apathy and hopelessness.

“I will look back on all this in 20 years and just think how life changing it was, in just the sense that it helped me grow,” he said. “It was a sharing of basic human decency.”

“This was the movement of Mr. Rogers in a lot of ways,” Seth said. “We’ve been really frickin’ good to our neighbors.”

Photos: Quinn Norton/Wired

This post is part of a special series from Quinn Norton, who is embedding with Occupy protestors and going beyond the headlines with Anonymous for Wired.com. For an introduction to the series, read Quinn’s description of the project.