John Byrnes boarded the windows and hired a security guard, but can't figure out why activists and anarchists planning to disrupt a meeting of the world's 20 most powerful leaders would want to bother with his 24-hour gym.
The X Shadyside 24-Hour Health & Fitness club is a one-man business, he says, not part of a profit-hungry conglomerate bent on global domination. Yet, like Starbucks and McDonald's, the gym is on a list of 80 businesses and organizations the Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project has targeted for protests during the Group of 20 summit Thursday and Friday.
"I'm just as curious as anybody why they're protesting my gym," he said.
Pittsburgh police spokeswoman Diane Richard said intelligence reports suggest thousands of protesters are expected in the city Thursday and Friday, but she had few details regarding demonstrations.
Representatives of the Pittsburgh Resistance Project, an umbrella organization of protest groups, didn't return phone messages. Its Web site describes plans for an unpermitted People's Uprising, "a mass march" Thursday that will begin in a neighborhood northeast of downtown and end at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, the primary site of the summit.
Rob Richie | Posted 11.06.2009 | Politics