A Happy and Sad Note About this Weekend

I don't have much information or insight on the protests but I do have stories about the aftermath. For my internship I write about Bloomfield and its businesses, so I was a little concerned when I heard that the riots had ended up there. The thing that concerned me the most was how it was going to affect this weekend's Little Italy Days, Bloomfield's big celebration for the year. Happily the riots didn't affect the festivities. Italian music and discussion of the previous day pervaded the air. People walked around the festival enjoying the food and booths that people had set up on the street. The only evidence of the riots yesterday were the broken ATMs at PNC on Liberty Ave., and they were quickly fixed within the first three hours that I was at the event. And while there was some concern of protestors parading through the event no one let it damper their spirits.

On a more concerning note I did see some of the aftermath after last night's protests. A friend wanted to attend someones 21st celebration at Peter's Pub but didn't want to go alone, so I tagged along. We decided to go down Bayard to try and avoid the craziness that was surely happening on Fifth and we had a pretty uneventful trip to the bar. By the time we reached Fifth the street looked pretty empty except for the cop cars that were heading towards downtown, so we figured the night's "festivities" were pretty much over. We were only at the bar for about a half an hour but that was more than enough time for me. While we were standing waiting for the birthday girl we saw the smoke coming from one of the police cannisters float down Oakland Ave and had a cop shine a light into the bar from his car. Shortly after this we decided it was safer to leave then rather than waiting to see what was going on. It turned out to be a wise idea because as we were crossing Fifth to go up Oakland to Bayard we had a line of police come down the street yelling for people to get off the street, one of their dogs run at us, and a cannister get shot on the other side of street. Let's just say we quicken our pace quite a bit after that to get home.