Zuccotti Park Owners, Brookfield Properties, Owe City $139,000 ...

December 5, 2011

Zuccotti Park Owners, Brookfield Properties, Owe City $139,000

Mayor Bloomberg may have been on the side of Brookfield Properties during the violent raid on Occupy Wall Street in November, but now it's looking like the Mayor will want to distance himself from the owners of Zuccotti Park.

According to the city's Finance Department, Brookfield Properties and its parent company owe $139,000 in unpaid business taxes dating from 2006 to 2009.

Councilman Jumaane Williams, who was wrongly arrested this summer while attending the West Indian Parade, and was arrested again during an Occupy Wall Street protest at the Brooklyn Bridge, pointed out the blatant irony in Brookfield's financial woes:

Occupy Wall Street has been talking about economic disparity...and here's Brookfield Properties, which has worked with the mayor to keep the messengers out, not paying their share.

A spokesman for Brookfield Properties disputed the claims and said the company would be in communication with the city's finance department to work through what they deemed as an error.

Others on the list of city debtors include the Philadelphia Eagles, Rev. Al Sharpton, and the law firm Binder and Binder.

Brookfield, which reportedly owns 6.2 million square feet in midtown and 12.8 million square feet in Lower Manhattan, was at the center of controversy during the city's Occupy Wall Street demonstrations when protestors took over Zuccotti Park to pitch tents for encampment.

At the start of the protests in October, Bloomberg dismissed protestors and insisted that neither Occupy Wall Street nor Brookfield Properties were topics of the Mayor's "pillow talk." However, that quickly changed as protestors gained momentum and national attention, and Bloomberg ordered hundreds of police officers to evict protestors during the middle of the night.

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