I spent the day at the Cubs World Series victory rally with my kids today. I let them ditch school, and I took a vacation day from work, and we joined a bunch of other people in Grant Park to celebrate.After we parked near Clark and Polk, we walked over to Grant Park where we encountered a mass, a throng, a shitload of people. We shuffled along the sidewalk, and through a chute like cattle, on our way to the bag check. Security had no problem with our sealed bottles of water and PB&J sandwiches, so we continued across Columbus, and over to Lower Hutchinson Field where the rally took place.We watched on big screens as the parade left Wrigley Field and headed down Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue. My youngest son and I left our spot in the Field and ran to Columbus Drive where we watched the parade pass. We cheered as we watched Ryne Sandberg, Kerry Wood, Jake Arietta, Kyle Schwarber, Addison Russell and the rest of the badass Cubs pass.As the last bus passed a wave of people who had gathered near the fence line to watch the parade, including us, suddenly ran back to the field. We found my other two kids and settled in to watch the rally.We watched a highlight video, listened to a few speeches, cheered the players when they came on stage, and, of course, sang “Go Cubs Go.” Then we left and waited in another seemingly endless line to cross back over Columbus to return to our car. After half an hour or so of shuffling along, some intuitive police officers decided to open another passage across Columbus and the human traffic jam immediately eased. We returned to our car, made a left turn on Clark, and got the hell out of there.I was quite surprised to hear that the city estimated attendance along the parade route and at the rally to be five million people.Wait a minute! Five million people? A five with six zeros behind it? Can that be right?I don’t think so.There were a lot of people, but sure as God made green apples, there’s no way there were five million people there.Let’s think of this a number of ways and see if this estimate makes sense.First, let’s assume that each person requires two square feet of space. That’s if people are jam-packed together, and if each person is about my size, 6 feet tall, 180 lbs. Obviously some will be bigger, and some will be smaller. But think of it like this, if you give each person two square feet of space, and you have a 2,000 square foot house, you should be able to fit 1,000 people in your house.Can you fit 1,000 people in your house? Probably not. But still, just for the sake of this calculation, let’s say you can. So each person takes up two square feet.Now, if there are five million people, at two square feet per person, that’s ten million square feet.
According to my calculations on Google Maps, Lower Hutchinson Field is about 750 feet wide and 1750 feet long, and that’s including the area where the stage was setup. So that’s 1.3 million square feet. At two square feet per person, that works out to 650,000 people. That’s assuming people were jam-packed over the entire surface of the field, which they weren’t.“But what about the parade route?” you ask.Good point. We need 4.35 million people on the parade route for the 5 million estimate to hold water.The route from Wrigley Field, to Lake Shore Drive, down Michigan, to Lower Hutchinson Field is about eight miles, or 42,240 feet.To fit 4.35 million people along that route, we’ll need 8.7 million square feet. The route is 42,240 feet long, so it has to be about 206 feet wide to total 8.7 million square feet.Michigan Avenue, and its widest point, is about 120 feet across, building-to-building. So obviously, 206 feet of people can’t fit in a space that’s only about 120 feet across. Never mind the fact that people didn’t fill the entire street, they only filled the sidewalks. (The parade had to pass through, after all!)So, no, there weren’t five million people along the parade route and at the rally at Lower Hutchinson Field. But how many were there?Well, the Field was about three-fourths full, so that’s about 487,000 people. And if we assume the eight-mile parade route had twenty feet of people on each side, for a total of forty feet, then that works out to about 850,000 people. So that’s about 1.33 million total.But the parade route didn’t have that many people the whole way (almost no one lined up along the three-and-a-half miles of Lake Shore Drive, the road’s too busy and access too difficult), and some of the people at the end of the route rushed over to Lower Hutchinson Field.So I’d say there were about a million people total.That’s still impressive! I think anyone who attended the rally would have been awe-struck to think of joining a million people to celebrate the Cubs.And no matter how many people were there, I know that my kids and I will remember this day the four of us shared for the rest of our lives. And that’s the most important thing of all.Click here to receive an e-mail each time I write a new post! Guaranteed spam-free, unsubscribe any time IF YOU LIKED THIS POST I BET YOU'LL ALSO LIKE: The Years I Played BaseballPREVIOUS POST: The Cubs Won the World Series, so Anything is Possible