Around the block from Park Slope’s Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, where police said some 200 pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested on Tuesday night, Roberto Martinez was just schlepping home.
When he reached the metal barricades, he sighed, set down the grocery bags he was holding and presented his ID to the NYPD officers wearing riot gear, who allowed him through so he could continue to his apartment.
“It was a lot in the fall and it seems to have picked up now that the warmer weather has come,” Martinez said, sighing again at the half-hour he spent trying to navigate the crowd. “It’s necessary. I wish it weren’t.”
Martinez’s neighbor is U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
At least 34,012 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, which killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials and the United Nations.
And while protests are a common New York occurrence, some people living in Schumer’s tony Brooklyn neighborhood said the demonstrations, which have been more or less ongoing since the attack, are becoming harder to live with.
Neighbors have endured weekly disruptions, with drums and chanting beginning as early as 5 a.m.
“I would call it bedlam,” Danny Nassi, who lives on President Street, said outside his home. “The noise is really what bothers me and I’m scared one day things are going to get out of hand, especially with the [political] climate right now.”
Schumer’s home sits at the top of Park Slope and looks out onto Prospect Park. Since Oct. 7, the normal streams of people in expensive athleisure pushing high-end strollers have run into a mass of demonstrators and a network of police checkpoints surrounding the senator’s 15-floor co-op.
Residents there expressed a range of frustrations at the police, the protesters and Schumer himself.
“It’s important to be a man or a woman of the people,” Nassi said. “If you have people that are chanting outside your building and they want to be heard, I think it’s nice to come out and be like, ‘Listen, I hear you. I acknowledge you.’”
David Van also lives on President Street.
“It’s frustrating because we’re not senators. We just live on the block,” Van said. “There was a week where it happened almost every day and it felt as if the goal was to annoy members of the community.”
But protesters have a unique opportunity to draw the attention of one of the most powerful people in America. And they point out that, thousands of miles from Park Slope’s brunch spots and park views, there is a humanitarian crisis unfolding.
“Writing letters and being nice to the oppressor, to the occupier, has never worked,” said Jane Hirschmann, a protester with Jewish Voices for Peace, who spent her 78th birthday protesting the Israel-Hamas war at Grand Army Plaza.
She said she had already been arrested outside Schumer’s residence several times. When the NYPD barricades are up, she said, she sits in the middle of Plaza Street, letting the traffic back up and the horns blare.
“If you look at any liberation struggle,” she said, “at some point, there’s disruption.”
The NYPD keeps metal barricades permanently staged at the intersections around Schumer’s building, ready to block all the streets. Even though Tuesday’s protest had been planned for several days, some residents only learned of the protests when they couldn’t get home.
“We know with a lot more notice when ‘Law & Order’ is filming on the block than we do if there’s going to be a protest,” Van said. “This is a family neighborhood. Everyone has kids and is trying to do stuff, and we rely on streets being open.”
Schumer, who was in Washington, D.C., during Tuesday night’s protest, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The NYPD also did not comment on how it warned residents of any potential street closures leading to Schumer’s building.
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