Inaugural crowd: 1 million and what?

by Noam N. Levey

More than 1 million spectators convened on the National Mall to watch Barack Obama take the oath of office Tuesday, but it was unclear if the crowd surpassed the record thought to have been set at Lyndon B. Johnson's 1965 inauguration.

Though early estimates ranged as high as 2 million people, satellite images of Obama's swearing-in suggested the crowd was probably about half that, said Clark McPhail, who has been analyzing crowds on the National Mall since the 1960s.

"It was sparser than I thought," said McPhail, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Illinois. "There were lots of open spaces."

The National Park Service, which calculates crowds for large Washington events, is expected to provide an estimate this week, a spokesman said.

Johnson's inaugural crowd was estimated at 1.2 million.

Counting crowds is an inexact and controversial science, and experts cautioned that it would be difficult to quickly calculate the size of the Obama gathering.

"A million rolls off the tongue very easily, but most people have no idea what it really looks like," McPhail said.

See the rest of the report on the inaugural crowd count in Tribune newspapers and here in the Swamp:

On Tuesday morning, the Washington Post initially cited security sources who put the crowd at 1.8 million.

The Associated Press, which did its own analysis, estimated "more than 1 million."

The park service has not done official estimates in more than a decade, complying with a congressional order to stop after a controversy over how many people attended the Million Man March in 1995. Estimates then varied from 400,000 to more than 1 million.

Park service spokesman David Barna said the agency probably would produce a number this year because of the historic nature of the event and public demand for an estimate.

"We don't think anyone in Congress will be really upset," he said.

McPhail pointed to relatively uncrowded sections of the mall between the Capitol and the Washington Monument and to thin crowds along the parade route to explain his estimate.

That would place the crowd significantly below the 3 million that Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty warned might converge on the city for the inauguration.

Some signs initially pointed to a record-setting event.

The crush in the morning was so large that, for a while, authorities shut off access to the eastern section of the mall between the Capitol and the Washington Monument, an area that when tightly packed can accommodate about 1 million people. About 240,000 ticket holders were in the area closest to the stage.

Sparser crowds filled in farther down the mall by the Lincoln Memorial.

Nearer the Capitol, inauguration-goers stood shoulder to shoulder, at one point packed so tightly that reaching into a pocket became nearly impossible.

"I lost my people a long time ago," said Michelle Murchison of Richmond, Va. "But, hey, I'm grown, I have a cellphone, I have a credit card."

Elsewhere, long lines of people waited for hours to get through security checkpoints to watch the inaugural parade down Pennsylvania Avenue.

And Washington's subway system was jammed starting before dawn as more than 545,000 people boarded trains before noon, when Obama was sworn in.

Some, like Teresa Wright, never made it.

"Unfortunately, I'm going to have to catch it on the news," she said, standing on a street corner near the White House.

Wright, who traveled to Washington from Philadelphia for the inauguration, said she was bitterly disappointed but happy that she had come.

"I was here," she said. "I heard the crowd roaring when he was sworn in."

Carla Hall and Richard Simon contributed to this report.