re: "official" count of whodats at the SB parade? PMS edition

Yeah you were owned, thanks for playing.

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Like 95% of BR residents, I didnt go.

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I am from Baton Rouge and I went. It was Awesome!!

We all said numerous times, I have never seen this many people in my entire life.

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I also know that 25% of louisiana residents didnt attend the parade.

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Yeah and of course no one from outside of Louisiana came...

Maybe 800K is high, but if you think only a few thousand more came to the parade than from the amount of people that saw the team at the airport then you're nuts.

If I had to make a guess based on the crowds I saw with no math to back it up, I'd have said about 500K. I don't think that's a stretch.

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TortiousTiger

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lol.

i have lived in the city my entire life and have never seen anything like that.

you had bumper to bumper gridlock from past i-12 to downtown, and back to laplace on 10. i know people who waited on ferries for 3 hrs and just gave up. people ended up just getting rooms because they waited in parking garages for hours without being able to pull out of there parking space after the parade. i had people around me from all over the country and from other countries.

this just sounds like some kid yall are talking too.

it's mardi gras hotels are at 95% occupancy prob closer to 100% after all the shite with the traffic on the way out happened. not to mention prob what i'd bet 70% of the metro area went. when i was out there i was telling everyone that i thought a million people were downtown. i wasnt to far off it seems. it is pretty easy to figure out if you compare to stuff like jazzfest voodoo fest or saints and/or lsu games. for saints games you easily have 100,000 in the immediate area around dome. i would estimate very close to ten times that amount yesterday .

it took three hours after the parade to be over before my girlfriend could even leave to go home, and it took her 45 minutes what is normally about a 15 min drive. at the largest parades nothing like that comes close to happening.

FWIW - I drove in from Dallas along with a couple friends just for the parade. There was no way in hell I was missing this celebration!

We were fortunate enough to have longtime friends in the FQ from when I used to live here and were able to stay with them because there were NO rooms available anywhere close to downtown (anywhere I would feel comfortable staying, that is). I used to be a marketing director for a FQ fine dining restaurant, so I have a lot of connections with concierges, etc... and if there was availability - I would've found it. Sure there was probably the occasional room available due to pure, dumb luck... but I'll leave the math experts to the probabilities.

As for the crowds... WOW. I got pretty good at judging crowds in order to gauge the kind of money I'd be pulling in as a bartender throughout the '90s and part of the '00s... I know that for an event such as a night parade, the FQ side of Canal is usually crowded, but probably not the most densely-packed section of the route because it is the least accessible to all but FQ walk-ups and people that work in those blocks and adjacent... I've seen many night parades from near where I watched the Saints parade - I can tell you that the crowd was almost twice as deep as any I'd previously seen. Places where I'd regularly see 5-8 deep were 9-12 deep MINIMUM.

Here's a couple photos to give you an idea of the crowd where I was (and this was on a turn, mind you - where crowds are thinner because the floats don't generally stop on a curve).




I'm standing in front of where the people with kids on ladder chairs formed their "wall of visual impairment"... As you can see - I'm about 7 or 8 people back from the front with at least 3 deep behind me including the ladders (and the folks meandering behind them).




It thinned out a little and I was able to move up when people moved because the floats were stopping about half a block up whenever the parade stalled. It's still about 9 deep at this point with even larger numbers visible up the way.


From hotel occupancy figures I was hearing - I'd be shocked to find there were less than 750K people along the parade route.

The best part is that when it comes out it was in the 500-600k range, he will come out and claim victory

25k........


There were that many people just around Gallier Hall.

Well since I'm the only person who was actually in the parade, I will offer that the crown was more than twenty deep, and in a lot of places hundreds deep. Canal street alone was 100k+. every cross street downtown was 50-100 deep. If they did this again the route should be the entirety of elysian fields, the widest street in the city, from the lakefront to the quarter.