Owner of protest park in dilemma

Associated Press

NEW YORK

The New York plaza commandeered by activists who helped birth a global protest is owned by a wealthy real-estate corporation with million-dollar properties around the world. It is, in other words, precisely the sort of company the protesters have been shouting about for more than a month.

Brookfield Office Properties owns Zuccotti Park, a granite space near Wall Street that, until recently, was a quiet outdoor plaza where New Yorkers occasionally ate lunch or relaxed on a bench. A highly respected real-estate power player, Brookfield now finds itself in an unprecedented quandary: How to keep the public from using a space that is, well, for the public.

The company has won praise for good security at its properties yet has fumbled in efforts to break up the encampment known as “Occupy Wall Street.” Its options are limited because Zuccotti Park is one of more than 500 “bonus plazas” in the city: privately owned public parks borne of a little-known compromise struck in 1961 between the city and developers.

The idea of Zuccotti Park took root in 1968, when U.S. Steel Corp. wanted to build a 54-story building — what later became One Liberty.

But the rule established in 1961 called for developers who want to build a tall building to construct a plaza to provide “light and air” that otherwise would have been blotted out by a towering skyscraper. The bigger the plaza, the more zoning concessions a company could reap.

City officials loved the idea of an open landscaped area right near the New York Stock Exchange.

The park, originally named Liberty Plaza, was destroyed during the World Trade Center collapse Sept. 11, 2001, and reopened in 2006. It was renamed after John Zuccotti, chairman of Brookfield’s board of directors.

Virtually all bonus plazas are required to be open 24 hours a day, barring a safety issue.

And police must be invited in by the owner, just as a homeowner would have to.