McPherson Square is on the mend these days, its grassy patches recovering from the abuse delivered by eight months of Occupy D.C., which left the park muddied and bald. Occupy D.C.’s last McPherson holdouts finally moved on last month, but with the increasingly less visible protest movement still insisting it has legs, where did they all go?
Petworth, naturally.
The Post reports today that residents of Varnum Street NW are not so enthused with their newest neighbors—a group of several dozen Occupiers living in a house on an otherwise quiet block full of older African-American families and newer, younger residents. But the “Occuhouse” is something different, Robert Joyner, who has lived in the neighborhood his entire life, tells the Post:
“I don’t even know who these people are. I’ve never seen them before,” Joyner said recently as he stood outside his home on Varnum Street. “They beat bongos. They play guitar. They stay up all night. And they [have sex] on the porch.”
Considering the Post’s sanitizing brackets, we’re guessing Joyner said something more direct than “have sex.”
But drum circles, jam sessions and coital displays aren’t the only nuisances the the Occupy-occupied house is creating. Even Pepco has had to get involved, with crews being dispatched to remove an illegal, jury-rigged power line tapped into the nearest electrical pole.
Other neighbors complain of trash piling up and large numbers of rats feasting on the detritus.
The owner is in a bit of a jam. Unlike some of Occupy’s other house-related actions, such as its protests to keep foreclosure victims in their homes when bank officials come knocking, the Varnum Street house has a tenant with a lease:
The owner of the semi-detached house, Maryland real estate agent LaJuan Poole, said she grew up there and has been trying to regain possession from an illegal tenant in court since 2008.
“It’s not like I’m some absentee owner,” Poole said. “I care a great deal about this property.”
Anthony Sluder, 47, a stagehand who lived at the Occupy camp in McPherson Square during the winter, said he has lived in the house since 2007 and has a lease. He said that he invited Occupy protesters to stay at the house but was unprepared for the “mayhem” that followed.
As Sluder tells the Post, “Friends told friends who told friends, and they were in the attic and the basement and the kitchen, anywhere they could lay down.”
Thing is, this kind of shacking up is typical of the Occupy movement when it comes to finding indoor digs. Earlier this year, as recounted in The New Yorker, a pair of Brooklyn roommates rented out their spare bedroom to “a nice girl from San Francisco.” That new roommate, however, turned out to be pals with Occupy Wall Street folks, and started inviting a bunch of them to sleep over. As James Pogue wrote in the May 14 Talk of the Town:
The friends began inviting friends. The apartment became loud and crowded with people hunched over laptops, and it was unclear whether any of them intended to pay rent. Beer was disappearing and every bowl in the house had been conscripted for use as an ashtray. The two women wondered what the newcomers were up to. “They Livestream,” [Charlotte] Matthews said. “And hack. I dunno.”
Back in Petworth, the residents of the “Occuhouse” aren’t planning on going anywhere. “One of them said, ‘I’ll get out when the marshals come and put me out,’ ” Poole told the Post.
