Occupy Long Beach Relocates to Bixby Park

Occupy Long Beach has decided for safety reasons to relocate from downtown's Lincoln Park to Bixby Park, a Belmont Shore resident and founding member said in an e-mail Wednesday. The local wing of the national Occupy Wall Street movement began gathering last year at Bluff Park not far from Bixby.

"After two and a half months ... primarily because of safety issues regarding non-OLB participants," the locals voted to repair to a park that might prove safer, wrote the co-founder, a professor who has gone by the name of Sonny Pencer to keep separate his job and his activism. Members, he said, "came to the realization that in order to continue the momentum and to grow the movement, it was necessary to leave that location."

As has been the case at several local chapters of Occupy Wall Street, outside trouble makers, some of them homeless, have broken into fights and made Occupy members staged at Long Beach and other public places feel endangered. This and the occupying of public parks with curfews have forced several police departments to get involved and several Occupy groups to reconsider their locations. 

  "At its General Assembly last night (Tuesday), the group considered several locations and after a couple of hours of sharing information about those locations and engaging in small group discussion, the consensus was to move to Bixby Park," wrote the resident calling himself Pencer.  "This Thursday in Bixby Park (on Junipero between 2nd and Broadway) at 7:30 p.m., the [group] will decide whether to have a 24/7 occcupation or some part thereof. Reagrdless of what is decided, OLB will continue to take the 'occupation' on the road and has a number of projects in the works to fight for the 99% in the struggle against corporate greed and malfeasance and the complicity of a corrupt and inept political system."

In explaining his fake name, Sonic "Sonny" Pencr, concluded, "is the nom de guerre of a Belmont Shore resident who is one of the founders of Occupy Long Beach.  In his 'other life,' he is gainfully employed as an economics professor and he also bathes regularly ....  The information and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily represent the diverse views of OLB."