Word: downtown
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Trade Organization, the bureaucrats may not have accomplished all that much last week. The chaos that surrounded them did. In this moment of triumphant capitalism, of planetary cash flows and a priapic Dow, all the second thoughts and outright furies about the global economy collected on the streets of downtown Seattle and crashed through the windows of NikeTown. After two days of uproar scented with tear gas and pepper spray, Americans may never again think the same way about free trade and what it costs...
...backlash in the streets started Tuesday morning, several hours before more than 25,000 largely peaceful marchers headed from a union-backed rally at Memorial Stadium, near the Space Needle, toward the shops and hotels of downtown. Many thousands of other protesters were already converging there, some engaged in peaceful sit-ins that blocked traffic. Things got serious when scattered groups of self-described Black Block anarchists, wearing all-black outfits with handkerchiefs or hoods covering their faces, started to smash windows and trash businesses, giving special attention to companies such as the Gap and Nike that have been accused...
...visiting dignitaries--including U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Barshefsky--spent part of Tuesday trapped in their hotels. With the morning's opening ceremonies canceled, frustrated delegates spent the hours muttering into their cell phones. By late afternoon, as police moved through downtown in armored personnel carriers, a stunned Mayor Paul Schell asked Washington Governor Gary Locke to send in the National Guard. Schell also slapped a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the city's downtown and imposed a 50-square-block no-protest order on downtown, which left demonstrators furious...
...calamity caused by the demonstration. If so, they were the only ones. Protest leaders had long promised as much, and websites have been bubbling for months about the gathering. Hundreds of would-be demonstrators attended camps in civil disobedience this summer in preparation. In a building not far from downtown, organizers literally mapped out about a dozen areas where they planned to choke off central Seattle so that delegates could not reach their meetings...
...police lost control first of downtown and then, in some cases, of themselves. Many of the demonstrators complained that the cops were using rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray against nonviolent protesters while a few blocks away vandals freely roamed the city throwing litter baskets through store windows. These complaints were seconded by angry residents of the city's Capitol Hill district, where police pursued protesters with tear gas and concussion grenades despite the fact that the area was outside the no-protest zone...