NUMBERS GAME:MORE THAN a million giddy spectators convened on the National Mall to watch Barack Obama take the oath of office on Tuesday, but it is unclear if the crowd surpassed the record believed to have been set at Lyndon B Johnson's 1965 inauguration when 1.2 million are believed to have turned out.
Though early estimates were as high as two million, satellite images of Mr Obama’s swearing-in suggested the crowd may have been about half that, said Clark McPhail, a sociologist who has been analysing crowds on the Mall since the 1960s. “It was sparser than I thought,” said Mr McPhail, a sociology professor emeritus from the University of Illinois. “There were lots of open spaces.”
Crowd-counting is an inexact and controversial science, and experts cautioned that it would be difficult to quickly calculate the size of the gathering. “A million rolls off the tongue very easily, but most people have no idea what it really looks like,” Mr McPhail said.
On Tuesday morning, the Washington Postinitially cited security sources who put the crowd at 1.8 million. The Associated Press, which did its own analysis, estimated "more than one million".
The National Park Service has not done official estimates in more than a decade, complying with a congressional order to stop in the wake of controversy over how many people attended the 1995 Million Man March.
Mr McPhail pointed to relatively uncrowded sections of the Mall between the Capitol and the Washington Monument and to thin crowds along the parade route. That would place the crowd significantly below the three million that Washington mayor Adrian Fenty warned might converge on the city.
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 monument, an area that, when tightly packed, can accommodate around one million people. Another 240,000 ticket-holders were in the area closest to the stage.
– ( LA Times-Washington Post)