How The Bow-Shed Crew Outwitted Yale

While graduate student demonstrators diverted the cops’ attention at two other locations, 30 supporters of a union protest fast slipped onto Yale’s Beinecke Plaza and swiftly erected a 25-foot-tall structure that has become a festive ​“Occupy Wall Street”-style gathering spot — and a headache for the university.

The arching plywood and plastic structure, dubbed ​“33 Wall Street,” is called a Stimson bowshed or boat shed. Members and supporters of UNITE HERE Local 33 — the new union representing some graduate student teachers — managed to build it in under an hour last week on Beinecke Plaza directly in front of the Yale president’s office.

Since then it has become a 24-hour gathering place for supporters of a fast staged by eight Local 33 leaders to protest Yale’s refusal to negotiate a first contract. (Click here, here, and here for previous coverage of both the protest and both sides’ arguments on the underlying issues.)

The eight fasters, who in the first six days of the water-only fast have grown visibly weaker but remain mentally alert, spend their days on couches inside the structure there, surrounded by supporters. When the fasters decamp to First & Summerfield Church at night to sleep, reinforcements move in to guard the fort. Professors have held class on picnic tables placed on an adjacent patch of artificial grass. Students and community members come just to hang out. On Monday afternoon bassoonist Erica Holahan and French horn player James Berger serenaded the group with a Mozart cello sonata, among other numbers. A U.S. Congresswoman and a U.S. senator have stopped by to pledge support; Rabbi Herb Brockman brought a cantor to conduct a Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat service.

Even opponents of the union drive have been drawn to the scene. College Republicans held a barbecue steps away one evening in an effort to weaken the fasters’ resolve. (“Didn’t faze us,” insisted faster Aaron Greenberg.) On Sunday afternoon someone paid to have Yorkside Pizza deliver 200 pies, which the fasters had re-routed to a feed-the-hungry church drive on the Green.

With each day, the encampment attracts more attention, including national media coverage, for Local 33’s cause. And it ups the pressure on Yale’s administration, which faces a no-win choice at this point: Tear down the encampment, and risk looking brutishly intolerant of free speech? Or leave up an embarrassing source of criticism that elevates a cause it would like to keep out of the public eye, weeks before thousands descend on campus for graduation, then thousands more for alumni reunions?

Yale has sent cops and high-ranking officials to the encampment daily to inform the protesters they are there without a permit. But officials won’t say if they plan to tear down the structure.

Asked Monday if Yale plans to leave the structure alone or raze it, spokesman Tom Conroy said the university has ​“nothing to add” on the subject beyond its previous statements, which failed to address the question. ​“The demonstrators have been formally notified that their continuing presence and the structure do not comply with university policies on free expression,” the most recent statement stated.

Yale may not have found itself in this predicament if not for some clever strategic planning on behalf of Local 33.

The planning began about a week before the structure went up. Organizers found this design online. Resembling a greenhouse, it is known as both a bowshed, for its shape, and a boatshed, for its common use for craft-building.

Thirty-some students, including engineering students, union members and community supporters, including some with woodworking and theater set-design experience, assembled the plywood and plastic and rented a box truck to bring the materials to assemble on Beinecke Plaza.

They had to drive a half block on Wall Street from the intersection of College to get there. Yale bought the street there from the city. It keeps the street open to traffic for the most part, but doesn’t have to. The shed-builders needed to make sure they could get through.

So Local 33 organized two protest actions last Wednesday morning to divert the attention of university officials and cops. The fasters assembled outside the university president’s house on Hillhouse Avenue. ​“President Salovey can end the fast,” they chanted.

Simultaneously, other Local 33 members assembled in Woolsey Hall to commit civil disobedience by disrupting a scheduled speech by Salovey as part of a ​“Bulldog Days” event for potential freshman accepted to Yale.

The truck passed up the block without interference. The 30 shed-builders made quick work of erecting the structure — and Yale had a problem on its hands.

Yale cops subsequently closed off the block to traffic. But it was too late.

“It has become a vital community space,” Greenberg noted Monday afternoon as he and other fasters huddled in sleeping bags or parkas, feeling chills after six days without food. They all remained lucid in conversation; Greenberg, a political science student, said he has trouble at this point focusing enough to work on his dissertation. Fellow faster Tif Shen shared a couch, still able to navigate calculations for his algebraic geometry dissertation. ​“My mind feels very clear,” said faster Robin Canavan as she had her vital signs checked, but her body felt tired.

On another couch, faster Charles Decker was working his way through Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi, sitting beside fellow faster Emily Sessions, who was rereading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale before watching the new Hulu interpretation.

All the fasters said the structure has fortified their fast, between the visitors it has drawn and the light rain from which it has shielded them.

“It’s the sort of public meeting space that hasn’t existed on campus,” Decker observed. He said visitors noted no other picnic tables outside of gated property at Yale.

“I love that [it] has brought the community together, that it’s a meeting space,” Sessions said. ​“It’s very heartening.”