I admit I was flying in the stratosphere yesterday as our new president was being sworn in. Here's a link to a satellite photo taken of the Washington, D.C., mall just under an hour before our 44th president was sworn in. You can zoom in and cruise around the photo, but I don't think you'll see Barack anywhere. One trivia bit: clean-up crews today are removing 130 tons of garbage from the mall area.
That is impressive!
Here's a story on the math behind estimating crowd sizes at events like the inaugural. Looks like there's a pretty wide margin of error on this. And upon further review, there might have been almost half as many people at the event – 800,000 – than what originally was reported.
I was wondering about the official count myself. And glad to see that the article you linked to mentioned that the National Park Service has generally stopped publishing crowd estimates after some public disputes over the numbers.
Before the inauguration, I tried to imagine the projected crowd of 2 to 4 million people. The only comparable event I could think of was the New Year's Celebration in Times Square, 1999. As it turns out, the New York City police department also generally declines to provide estimates of crowd sizes for the same reason. But Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor of the city at the time (and presumably privy to NYPD info), pegged the crowd at close to 2 million people.** Sounds like the inauguration crowd was roughly the same size.
If 1.8 million people doesn't wow you, consider this: the US Census Bureau estimated the 2008 population of Washington D.C. at 591,833 people. So the crowd on the National Mall was some three times bigger than the entire official population of the city.
**I particularly liked the last quote in the article. See? That's how we can put our differences aside and move on. :)
Here's a little more about the DC population, from Wikipedia:
By noon on the 20th the metro (subway) had sold 400,000 tickets!
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