A note about numbers
A relatively conservative delineation of the protest area at the historic Haywood County Courthouse suggests a square footage of more than 10,000.
Google Earth photo
I get asked about it after every protest I’ve been to, from Andrews to Asheville, from Chicago to Washington, D.C., and everywhere in between.
Rally attendance is one of the most debated aspects of any public gathering — be it left, right, center, secular or spiritual. At outdoor venues that don’t use ticketing and don’t have fences or walls to contain the crowds, estimates can be even more difficult.
Sure, numbers don’t mean everything, but to some, they’re important. Organizers hope for solid attendance that can testify to an event’s popularity, which is precisely why such self-interested analysis can be unreliable.
But with some quick geometry and simple long division, one thing that can be definitively stated is how many people can fit on Haywood County’s most popular protest ground, the Historic Haywood County Courthouse.
Using Google Earth, a protest area of just the central concrete walkway and the two quarter-circles on either side — with cutouts for the landscaping separating them — is shown to contain roughly 10,228 square feet.
For events where people mostly stand, some sources say 10 square feet per person is “comfortable.” According to personal and perimeter security product retailer Sonoco Crowd Control, planning 6 square feet for person is a good rule of thumb. “Mosh-pit” density is around 2.5 square feet per person.
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Using those estimates and the defined area on the courthouse lawn, 4,091 people could fit if the whole place was packed at 2.5 square feet per person; 1,704 people could fit at 6 square feet per person and 1,022 could fit at 10 square feet per person.
For accuracy, it’s important to note that crowd density is rarely uniform, and it certainly wasn’t at the June 14 “No Kings” rally.
The central concrete walkway alone contains 1,475 square feet and thus can hold between 147 and 590 people. During the rally, most of this area was pretty close to that 2.5 square-foot density.
Areas on the lawn near the stage were equally dense but thinned out towards the sides and back along North Main Street. Each semicircular lawn segment contains approximately 4,300 square feet and thus can hold between 430 and 1,720 people.
Drilling deeper, there are two triangular areas on either side of the stage, the southernmost adjoining Depot Street and the northernmost adjoining the Haywood County Justice Center. On June 14, some demonstrators had lined up along North Main Street near the mailbox and crosswalk, about as far north as the Justice Center sign — but there’s not really much room there.
Although there were people in the “triangles” and along North Main, it wasn’t a mosh pit, so we’ll disregard those areas altogether to ensure a conservative estimate for this event, and for future events.
Conservatively, the bulk of the Haywood County Courthouse lawn can easily hold 1,000 people on the low end and 4,000 people on the high end.
Organizers of the June 14 rally claimed 2,200. Are they right? Maybe — but at least they’re in the ballpark of what’s feasible.
I attended the rally, and even at a relatively spacious at 6.8 square feet per person would feel comfortable with an estimate of about 1,500 people. Still, it was easily the largest such event I’ve been to, on that lawn, in more than nine years of reporting.
— Cory Vaillancourt, Politics Editor
