Women’s March in Los Angeles Overwhelms Downtown

The City of Los Angeles is roughly 3.8 million people big, and it felt like a good fourth of them were packed onto downtown streets for the Women’s March on Saturday. Santa Barbara alone organized more than a thousand people to head south.

From Orange County to West L.A., the metro train and bus systems were overwhelmed with rally-goers, cheerfully upbeat about standing-room-only conditions and hour-long waits for a ride to Pershing Square. A crowd waiting for a train in Studio City that never came began a spontaneous march with hundreds of people through the city.

That optimistic spirit prevailed during the long wait for the march to begin downtown, with wall-to-wall people for over a dozen blocks surrounding the route up Hill Street to City Hall. Women wearing suffragette white swayed in a choreographed dance to drums on one street; on another choruses of “Amazing Grace” and “America the Beautiful” rang out. Impatience turned into loud chants: “I don’t want your tiny hands, anywhere near my underpants!”; “Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go!”; and a well-organized crowd of men chanting “Her body, her choice!” answered by women calling “My body, my choice!”