Around 100 activists gathered on the fifth-floor terrace of Trump Tower on Tuesday afternoon for a teach-in protest calling on New York City to divest its pension funds from fossil fuels.
"It's the end of the world! It's the end of the world!" protest evangelist Reverend Billy's Stop Shopping Choir sang to kick off the event. "Only so many beautiful days on Earth."
"We're gathered around at Trump Tower here today to send a very loud and clear message to the Trump administration and leaders of the city and state that the time to divest is now," said Denise Patel, coordinator for the Divest Invest Initiative, which aims to pressure institutions into divesting from fossil fuels and investing in renewable energy. Patel and organizers with the allied group 350 said it makes sense to push New York's liberal leaders at a time when the federal government is rife with climate science denialists and fossil fuel industry bigwigs.
"New York has shown itself to be a climate leader, both in the city and the state, especially following superstorm Sandy, and is really responding to what the people here want," Patel continued.
City Comptroller Scott Stringer, the main target of the campaign and steward of the city's $175 billion pension funds, has initiated a series of projects aiming to reduce the pensions' reliance on fossil fuels in various ways, but his office says that across-the-board divestment would be fiscally irresponsible without further study showing it won't hurt pensioners.
"Here’s what these folks aren’t telling you: Scott Stringer has one of the strongest environmental records around," Comptroller's Office spokesman Jack Sterne said in a statement. "From being one of the first to fight against fracking nationwide, to working with comptrollers and treasurers across America to support the Paris Agreement, to fighting against climate deniers and pushing for climate competent corporate boards, Comptroller Stringer has gotten real results."
Reverend Billy and his Stop Shopping Choir in a spirited round of Earth-a-lujahs. (Scott Heins/Gothamist)
The protest lasted around half an hour. The terrace, and activists' access to it, was made possible by a deal Donald Trump struck with the city back in the '70s ahead of the tower's construction as part of the privately owned public space program. Under the arrangement, Trump got to build the tower 20 stories taller than he would have otherwise in exchange for keeping the lobby and terraces open to the public and offering retail stores on the ground level.
At Trump Tower, as at most of the 332 other POPS spaces in the city, management doesn't always play by the rules. For example, it took $18,000 in fines and a deluge of news stories to get the Trump Organization to replace a required bench in the lobby and remove the kiosks it had been replaced with, which were being used to hawk Make America Great Again swag.
Also mysterious, until now, was the closure of the fourth-floor terrace since at least December. A sign indicates that the closure is "DUE TO CONSTRUCTION," but no workers or equipment are visible, and no permits are on file for such work. The Trump Organization has in the past declined to comment on that and another unexplained POPS closure (at the plaza beside the Trump International Hotel and Tower) and did not respond to a comment request for this story.
Department of Buildings spokesman Alex Schnell tells Gothamist that an inspector responded to a complaint about the terrace in January, and established that the space had been closed for security reasons. "All of Trump Tower is now under the jurisdiction of" the police department, he said.
Last June, the DOB announced that it was investigating whether Trump violated the terms of his POPS agreement through repeated unapproved lobby closures during his presidential campaign. Now it seems that the probe is stalled and the agency is waiting for a witness to go on record about the closures.
"Nobody ever came forward to submit an affidavit in evidence, and that's what we would need to give him a violation for those closures," Schnell said. Not that the agency is holding its breath. He continued, "We're not looking for the witnesses. If somebody wants to come forward and say, 'I was at Trump Tower on x date and they closed the POPS space for a campaign event,' we'll certainly take that."
Tuesday's teach-in was the fourth held on or near the terrace space since March, and police arrested 25 immigration-rights protesters who dropped a banner and chanted in the lobby in April.
A member of the Trump Tower security team watches over the proceedings. (Scott Heins/Gothamist)
The repeat visits have led to tense exchanges with building security, which includes NYPD officers, Secret Service agents, and Trump Organization hired men. Around a dozen security people in suits, and one hoodie, monitored Tuesday's event from the sidelines, and four FDNY medical personnel stood by inside the terrace door.
The event also attracted a loafer-wearing young man whose business card identifies him as Fred Brown III of a group called Common Sense Energy. Brown nervously paced the sidelines of the protest, and pulled me aside to offer "the other side" of the divestment debate.
"If you're cutting out tens of billions of dollars from a state pension fund, and you're investing in green energy as part of that portfolio, you're going to have a billion dollar shortfall, and that's going to fall on the pension holders," Brown suggested. According to 350's analysis about $3 billion of the city's pension investments are tied to fossil fuels. Some of the five city pension funds recently decided to divest from coal after a study showed that the impact would be negligible, according to the Comptroller's Office.
"Fred Brown III" (Nathan Tempey/Gothamist)
What's more interesting than what Brown was saying is what he was doing: attending a protest rally specifically to provide counter-messaging on behalf of some unknown entity. Asked who backed his group, Brown said "Basically, it's industry-backed. It's backed by the industry." Asked in various other ways if he knew who specifically he was representing, Brown repeated this line, and at one point said "not off the top of my head." (350 is supported by a variety of funders, heavy among them the Rockefellers, and a center founded by a former General Motors honcho and the daughter of an IBM founder.)
A cursory Startpage search shows no record of a Common Sense Energy coalition advocating for the oil and gas industry, nor a Fred Brown III working in energy. The domain of the website listed on his business card—smartenergynow.com—is for sale, and no one answered at the Alaska cellphone number listed on the card.
The teach-in concluded with a tug-of-war between Stringer and Trump stand-ins wearing masks. Activists had planned to chant their way out of the building, but an NYPD officer warned that they could be arrested for disorderly conduct if they did so, so they scrapped that, according to organizers. Police made no arrests.
The protest was part of an international week of action around divestment, which includes several other planned events in New York City. For more information click here. 350 and New York Communities for Change are also encouraging other New Yorkers to organize demonstrations on the Trump Tower terrace, and have created a #TakeTrumpTower website to publicize them.
