One day during my freshman year of high school, I was at school after-hours to work with the stage crew. We all heard chanting and yelling coming closer to our building. We looked out the window and saw a giant crowd of people heading west down our block. It was an Occupy Wall Street mob leaving Union Square Park.
Union Square has been a gathering place for New Yorkers almost since it was first laid out in 1832. After just under three decades of relative peace, Union Square saw its first massive gathering after the battle of Fort Sumter in 1861, when a quarter million New Yorkers gathered there in the largest display of patriotism at the time. Union Square continued to be a gathering place throughout the Civil War, namely for draft riots.
To this day, Union Square is still New Yorkers’ default activism location. I went to high school a block and a half away, so I was actually able to see some of this activism. The big ones were Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and a series of anti-police brutality protests in 2015, but there were plenty of smaller protests consisting of a few dozen people. The one I most vividly remember was a Free Tibet protest.
After 9/11, Union Square became the city’s mourning site. The south end of the park was filled with memoranda for lost loved ones, such as candles, flowers, and American flags. I didn’t go to school in the city in 2001 and was too young to go to there at such a crazy time, but every account I’ve heard says the memorial was one of the most beautiful things ever. There was no Yankees versus Mets or Brooklyn versus Queens – it was just New Yorkers coming together to mourn their losses. There is now a memorial in the Union Square subway stop between the 16th Street entrance and the 4, 5, and 6 trains.
That’s just Union Square on the big days. Most days, there aren’t huge protests, memorials, or massive displays of patriotism. Most days, Union Square is simply a park where people can have fun, enjoy a snack or drink, or perform in the street. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, there’s a farmers’ market on the west side of the park with vendors from all over the Northeast. In the months before the winter holidays, the south end of the park is turned into a holiday market with unique items sold every few feet. In the center of the park, there are benches, tables, a dog run, and a large lawn. NYC Parks & Rec. does a pretty terrible job of making sure the lawn is open when it’s supposed to be open, so don’t go Union Square just for the lawn.
Union Square is 2 blocks east of the 14th Street PATH station. If you go there coming from anywhere else in the city, the park is above one of the busiest subway stations in the city, carrying the N, Q, R, L, 4, 5, and 6 trains. I highly recommend visiting it at the end of a fun event elsewhere in the city, before heading back to Hoboken.
