The camp was Boston’s connection to the populist Occupy movement that has expanded worldwide in opposition to corporate greed, wealth inequity, and the free flow of money in politics.
City officials embraced much of the message, but eventually tired of the methods.
In the end, the half-acre encampment on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway gave way peaceably, as a phalanx of law enforcement moved in, stunningly fast. It vanished amid the noisy grind of a trash compactor that crushed tent poles and makeshift furniture that hundreds of police officers dragged from the site.
It ended with dozens of demonstrators in plastic handcuffs, some literally carried away in a face-saving finale to an occupation that had declared it would never willingly abandon the land.
It ended without cracked skulls, tear gas, or bloodshed, a victory for both sides.
The protesters never issued a set of demands, and often it seemed they were pulling in different directions. But the encampment came to stand for a gut feeling, felt by many who have suffered in recent hard economic times, that some people get extremely rich on the engine of capitalism, but lots of others get run over.
“They have some very valuable ideas that need to be talked about more,’’ said Police Commissioner Edward Davis, early Saturday, as his officers sliced empty tents with knives and collapsed them.
The movement dates to mid-September with the establishment of Occupy Wall Street. The flagship protest in New York’s Zuccotti Park was within sight of financial institutions blamed for crashing the US economy.
The Boston camp was a smaller copy of the original, in the shadow of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, but surrounded mostly by companies that suffered from the financial collapse, rather than perpetrated it.
Still, many who camped in Dewey Square were thrilled by their own little taste of 1960s-style, take-it-to-the-streets political action, as well as the notion that they were part of something big and important, many for the first time in their lives.
