I left work early yesterday also, since we had received the "Traffic Advisory" earlier in the day.
Later, I watched local news. CBS2 reported "hundreds" of marchers and showed footage of some rag-tag protestors. ABC7 gave a much more sympathetic report. Melissa McBride sounded like she was reading the WCW press release verbatim; they interviewed a few idiots, reported 500 in attendance at the Federal Building and that was it.
Anyway, the event was obviously a total failure. In fact, it was encouraging to see that there was more law enforcement out in the streets than protestors.
500 people was a generous estimate!!! The City never should have shut those streets down....
We were bombarded with email advisory notices beginning Monday. Interestingly they never mentioned what group was to protest until late on the 2nd.
I agree the hype was larger than the turn out. I also agree the streets should not have been closed unless of course the carpet bombing was scheduled to begin as well. /grin