Tired feet and frozen fingertips didn’t chill the spirits of the record-breaking crowds who actually made it to Tuesday’s swearing in of President Obama, but some would-be revelers hit a wall.
The approximately 1.5 million people who did pack the parade route and much of the National Mall shoulder-to-shoulder, and spilled over into the space between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, will likely go down as the largest crowd in Washington’s long history of giant events.
The 1.1 miles between the West Lawn of the Capitol and the Washington Monument appeared to be packed with people at “high density,” or two-and-a-half-square-feet per person, said Clark McPhail, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois.
That would amount to about 1 million people in that space, though he cautioned that detailed photos were not yet available.
Another 450,000 could fit between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial if packed at the same density, which varying crowd reports surmised.
“This is certainly the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen,” McPhail said. The inauguration of Lyndon Johnson in 1968 is reported to have the previous record at 1.2 million, but many attribute that estimate more to Johnson’s bravado than an actual head count.
The crowds could’ve been even larger but for thousands of ticket holders turned away at the gate when time and space ran short. Even ticket holders who showed up near dawn only made it inside the coveted area mere minutes before the event’s start.
Jennifer Dobbs Woods, a United Way employee who traveled all night from Erie County, Pa., stood one block from the entrance when she was turned back.
“I was near tears all day,” said Woods, who watched the ceremonies on television at the California Pizza Kitchen in Dupont Circle.
But for those who staked out a spot, however small, the reward was great.
“Obama doesn’t just make sense, he makes beautiful sense,” said Charlie Barnett, a 57-year-old composer living in Bethesda, commenting on Obama’s eloquence in his speech.
John Morton, 68, a financier from Boston, said Obama’s inaugural was “the most significant event of my lifetime, with the possible exception of the end of World War II.”
Morton added: “We’ve declared to ourselves and the world that we are capable of change. I don’t mean change in a hackneyed sense. I mean we stood up, took a look at ourselves, saw something wrong and decided to fix it.”
Even annoyances like too few port-a-potties couldn’t sully the day for Wanda Thomas, a Bronx, N.Y., woman who arrived early Tuesday morning with two friends.
“The Mall bathrooms were too crowded and had been used all day,” Thomas said, but she was relieved to find free coffee, cookies and restrooms at downtown’s New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, once the congregation of Abraham Lincoln.
“It was a Godly sent pit stop,” Thomas said.
Josh Friedman, a D.C. resident, pointed at the jubilant crowds leaving the Mall after the ceremony and said, “When Barack Obama throws a party, this is what happens.”
One of those thousands plodding northward along the carless downtown streets was 8-year-old Nicco Nolen Brady from Chicago. Bundled in puffy winter gear underneath an oversized T-shirt printed with a picture of the new first family, Brady was pensive about what he’d witnessed.
“I felt,” he said, and paused. “I felt like there was a time machine, and we have to start all over again with a new history coming.”
Examiner reporters Bill Myers, Kaitlyn Funk and Lindsay Perna contributed to this story.
