A lone demonstrator who climbed atop an arch of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in Washington to protest war and artificial intelligence — and stayed there for six days, captivating onlookers in the nation’s capital — has come down, authorities said on Wednesday.
The man, Guido Reichstadter, 45, first mounted the arch on May 1 as protesters rallied elsewhere in the city for anti-billionaire demonstrations. After finishing his climb, Mr. Reichstadter pitched a tent and unfolded a black banner that he has described as a symbol of mourning for civilians killed in the U.S.-Israel war in Iran.
Addi Vander Velde, a spokeswoman for Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, said on Wednesday that Mr. Reichstadter was taken into custody and charged with several crimes, including failure to obey an officer and unlawful entry.
In an interview with The Times on Tuesday from his perch over the Anacostia River, Mr. Reichstadter, a former jeweler and the father of two, said he had initially planned to hold his place atop the arch only through the weekend. On Sunday, he signaled on social media that he would come down shortly.
But he reversed course soon after, and even after running out of food and water, he chose to remain atop the southeastern shore arch, one of three arches that make up the 1,600-foot bridge that opened in 2021.
On Tuesday, Mr. Reichstadter said he was expecting rain the following day, an indication it might be time to dismount. Later that evening, he posted on social media that he planned to leave in the morning.
“My water ran out Sunday & I’m heading down in the morning,” Mr. Reichstadter wrote. “I’ll probably be going to jail for a while when I get down.”
This time, he stayed true to his word.
The rain had already started to fall in Washington on Wednesday morning when Mr. Reichstadter left the bridge. Video posted to social media shows him descending from the arch via an internal passageway and meeting law enforcement waiting in a bucket lift further down.
Vito Maggiolo, a spokesman with the city’s fire department, said Wednesday that firefighters worked with local police to safely remove Mr. Reichstadter from the bridge.
From there, Mr. Reichstadter was transported to a hospital for observation, Mr. Maggiolo said, though there was no indication Mr. Reichstadter had any serious medical issues after descending.
It was not the first time that Mr. Reichstadter had occupied an arch of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in protest. He previously took up a perch there in 2022 for more than 24 hours to protest the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
After that demonstration, Mr. Reichstadter quit his job as a jeweler in Florida and relocated to Northern California to advocate against the development of A.I. technology, he told The Times on Tuesday. In recent years, he has engaged in several other public demonstrations, including chaining the doors of an OpenAI office in San Francisco and holding hunger strikes.
Mr. Reichstadter’s arrest on Wednesday may compound legal troubles stemming from those other demonstrations. He said he missed a court date related to an earlier charge while atop the bridge.
Mr. Reichstadter said he did not come to Washington with the intent of climbing the arch. He had arrived in the city the previous week, he said, to attend a talk on the risks of artificial intelligence hosted by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. But, enraged by the war in Iran, and disappointed by what he saw as a lack of popular mobilization against it, he made a spur-of-the-moment decision.
“It’s a stain on who we are as people that there is not outrage and resistance over this,” Mr. Reichstadter said of the war. “And I think it’s partly not seeing that resistance that drove me to say I’m just going to do this.”
JoAnna Daemmrich contributed reporting.
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