Occupiers make Mellon Green Downtown home

A.J. Walker is tired.  Weary-eyed, the 28-year-old stands at the kitchen tent with a friend’s… A.J. Walker is tired.  Weary-eyed, the 28-year-old stands at the kitchen tent with a friend’s dog, Hitchhiker, looking for a cup of coffee. Saturday night he was on night patrol, walking up and down rows of tents in search of any signs of trouble.

“We’ve supposedly had some rumors going around on the Internet that there are going to be people coming here to attempt to incite fist fights throughout the camp,” Walker said. “All was pretty quiet last night though, nothing happened.”

Walker, from Pittsburgh’s South Side, is one of more than 200 occupiers who took to the streets of Pittsburgh on Oct. 15 and crafted their residence on Mellon Green Downtown, birthing the Occupy Pittsburgh movement. Now, three weeks later, that movement continues to organize and advance an at-times-confused public presence. Occupy movements have formed nationwide to protest corporate greed, social injustices and disparities between the rich and the poor.

Walker spends most of his time at the Occupy camp base, helping out in any capacity that he can. He’s only left the camp a few times since it was set up, those times to work odd jobs in construction. He said he hopes to one day return to school.

After a few days at the encampment, he adjusted to the cold. Though he said the hours sometimes begin to blur, he nevertheless remains committed.

“There’s a good thing happening here, and I want to be a part of anything good that’s happening,” Walker said.

Located between the Downtown intersections of Sixth Avenue with Ross and Grant streets, Occupy Pittsburgh initially looks like a recovery station for victims of a natural disaster.

But upon further investigation, the large tents, tarps and cardboard and wooden pathways each serve a purpose. Large tents, often covered in tarps to protect against rain, offer shelter for a medic, a painting station, an information center, a library and a kitchen equipped with hot plates, fire extinguishers and supplies of food and water.

The tents have all been numbered in an effort to keep a census. As of Saturday night, 106 tents were set up.

Throughout the day, the kitchen staff works to stock and distribute donations that arrive from contributors to the cause. Each day a changing assortment of supporters drop off food, supplies, gift cards and cash donations.

Jimmy Blue Thunder, 51, of Anadarko, Okla., sipped coffee while waiting to receive one of the sandwiches donated only moments earlier.  

Shouts of “meat” run throughout the camp.

“We get a lot of vegan and vegetarian food donated, so it’s nice when we carnivores get fed,” Blue said, smiling with sandwich in hand.

Blue Thunder, a member of the Lenni Lenape tribe, has found himself in a puzzling predicament.

After finding out that he had stage-three kidney disease, he could not find work. “No one will hire me,” he said. Jobless, Blue Thunder was eventually forced to spend three months living on the streets.    

“I have three college degrees in electrical [engineering], business management and architectural computer-aided graphics. I have an IQ of near 200. I’m what they call a Renaissance Man. I study history and science; I go to plays and operas,” Blue Thunder said.

Saturday night, LouAnne Hoffman stood talking within a small group of people. Weekdays she works as a commodities investor and a nonprofit fundraiser. On the weekends, she is a self-proclaimed “weekend warrior,” occupying one of her two tents in the area. She calls the second, Tent 106, her “guest house.”

Hoffman, 55, of Irwin, Pa., said she was waiting for “people to wake up and smell the coffee.”

“We have been manipulated for a long time. The corporations and politicians are now in bed with one another, and that is now a system that is broken,” Hoffman said. “It’s about creating a future, and this is the start of it.

Hoffman said that the Occupy Pittsburgh system is one of horizontalism.

“There is no top-down structure. That’s what corporations do,” Hoffman said, glancing at the surrounding high-rises of BNY Mellon and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

“These guys have been manipulating our lives all the way down. Everything is for profit. We are slaves to what they want,” Hoffman said. “We finally woke up and smelled the coffee.”

Still, she recognizes that Pittsburgh has been fortunate in the way the city police have handled the movement.

“We’ve been very blessed that our police have been very cordial and reasonable on this, and we’re very thankful for that because they’re 99 percent too,” Hoffman said.

Hoffman’s tentmate, Cathy Stapinski, of Lawrenceville, Pa., holds steady employment and is a student. The widow, self-proclaimed CEO and mother of a 19-year-old college student, expressed her strong belief in the movement and her choice to live with less to raise her son with values.

“I’m here for us all. We are all neighbors, we are all important. This is so important,” Stapinski said. “The timing is spot-on. I waited until now to put the tent up. I’ve been watching and participating in outreaches and paying attention, but now I’m making a stronger stand.”

Favian Xavier, a 32-year-old student at the Community College of Allegheny County, is constantly on the move. At night he uses a headlight to guide curious visitors on tours of the Mellon Green camp. At the tours’ end, he leads them to the information tent, where Occupy Pittsburgh’s constitution is displayed with flyers from organizations visiting the campsite.

“We have a lot of older people and a lot of younger people working together here, trying to talk about real solutions to a world that has got so may problems,” Xavier said. “It’s important for young people to start talking about these real issues, because they will be our life’s work. We might as well get started.”