Photo by Doug Porter
By Born Dorn
At 9:30 the No. 7 bus driver stopped for us even though he’d lighted the “Out of Service” banner. He told us with a smile “room for two more.” Passengers were butt to butt and belly to belly. A woman said she loved my hat: I’d cut out the letter N and O, for NO, and taped them to the red baseball cap I hadn’t been wearing lately out of fear I’d be considered a TrumpLump.
By the time we’d arrived at Broadway at the 12th Ave. Transit Center crowds on foot were already heading toward the Civic Center. Cars and buses could only inch along beleaguered Broadway. So we jumped off the bus at 4th Ave. and headed north to B St.
We went over chains at parking lots, and squeezed through 5-inch gaps between walls and fence posts in order to get closer to the main crowd — we were probably 200 or 300 feet from the speakers’ stand. We couldn’t see them, so it’s impossible to say how far away we were from the center. Looking south on 2nd Ave. we could see the crowd on Broadway couldn’t move.
I asked a cop how many the department estimated. 25,000. In San Diego, it’s safe to simply double the numbers of lefty crowds estimated by officials of the city. 50,000 may be low. As we left a little after 11 am (because we couldn’t squeeze our way to the Federal Courthouse) more people were arriving.
Photo by Doug Porter
My favorite sign: Keep Your Rosaries off my Ovaries. Others:
The Public Face of Love is Justice (attributed to Cornel West); Respeta mi Existencia o Espera mi Resistencia (trans. Respect my Existence or Expect my Resistance); Tod@s Somos Un@. The young woman carrying that last message conceded it leaned toward feminism but said, “This way it can be seen both ways.” We’re all one.
Going home, we saw the trollies were stopped and out of service at 5th Ave and C St. and the buses that normally travel north or south on 5th or 6th. had been rerouted by the unintentional blockade. People … just… wanted… to be… somewhere near sanity.
Make my estimate 60,000. And that may be low.
#SanDiego #WomensMarch Civic Ctr plaza overflowing down all side streets. Chanting and drumming and the sun just came out! pic.twitter.com/4VqCJlFV6N
— Terry Bunting (@terrybunt) January 21, 2017
Bob Dorn
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As a Lyft driver, I drove 4 women with pussy hats downtown as close to Civic Center as I could get. They mentioned that all store were sold out of pink yarn.
Two or three trains at the Morena trolley stop were full before we could get on one. By the time we got to Civic Center Plaza the only place you could get a sense of it was in the parking structure, which also kept you out of the sprinkle. Couldn’t understand a word of the speeches, though. Everybody was cheerful and polite despite the crowding.
So far as we could see Broadway was full of people from Harbor Drive to as far as we could see east. People on the cruise ships waved and encouraged us.
A great day.
I am very disappointed at the lack of local news coverage on this!!
Thank you for sharing.
This great grandmother & former San Diego Reader feature writer squeezed into an absurdly crowded trolley at Hazard Center & wound up squeezed again nostril-to-nostril at Civic Center Plaza. Then shuffled (too crowded to actual march) to the County Admin Bldg on Pacific Highway. Exhausted but energized by old timer solidarity after having marched in protest to every war from since Viet Nam, I felt as if this was my last hurrah. In times gone by there was always a strong media presence but on Jan. 21, 2017 there wasn’t any discernible 4th estate. How could this crowd of at least 50,000 be ignored?