I was at the 1999 Women’s World Cup Final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. A-a-a-and that’s about it.
Does Operation Iraqi Freedom count???
Watkins Glenn '73 with The Dead, The Band, and the Allman Brother(s). About 600,000 people. Wiki says this: “Many historians claimed that the Watkins Glen even was the largest gathering of people in the history of the United States. In essence, that meant that on July 28, one out of every 350 people living in America at the time was listening to the sounds of rock at the New York state racetrack. Considering that most of those who attended the event hailed from the Northeast, and that the average age of those present was approximately seventeen to twenty-four, close to one out of every three young people from Boston to New York was at the festival.”
I was also at the infamous Buck Dent game that was a one game end of the season playoff between the Yankees and Red Sox.
Not being a sports person, my biggest evens are sold out Tom Petty concerts.
I was in Shanghai on Najing West road(shopping street) in October 2003, which is during the National Holiday.
The road is several kilometers long and was packed shoulder to shoulder with people.
I’ve never seen anything like it.
From the culturally significant I’ve attended a Super Bowl, a Final Four and Game 6 of the Cubs NLCS a.k.a. “The Bartman Game.”
I’ve been to several Taste of Chicago’s with attendances well over a million for the July 3rd fireworks shows.
I was a eight year old in this crowd gathered to meet the Pope when he came to Ireland in 1979. 1 million people were there. That was a quarter of the population of the country back then.
Don’t have numbers but U2 at Wembley in about 1994, three Glastonbury Festivals in the 1980s, David Bowie at Milton Keynes in 1983, and a huge Anti-Apartheid march in London in 1987 or 1988 are probably the biggies.
The bicentennial Australia Day in 1988
Singing at a Papal mass in Sydney
I was one in a sea of 31,000 people in Philadelphia; 52,000 people in Toronto, and almost 35,000 people in Montreal.
Me, my husband, my SIL and her husband, and about 249,996 of our closest friends watched the 4th of July fireworks from the FDR in Manhattan a few years back.
I was there for the Big Bang.
I tend to avoid crowds, so I can’t recall any big events. But the biggest historically (at least, historically in sports) was when I attended my first baseball game in 1961. It was the last game of the season, and Roger Maris hit a home run*.
The Korean War.
Expo 1967 in Montreal. According to Wiki, it drew over 50M people, thankfully not all at once.
I went to college in New Orleans. The entire Mardis Gras celebration has several million people and the day of Mardis Gras itself has about 1,000,000 plus mostly wasted and indecent acting people.
That’s why you don’t put the fanny pack over your eyes…I thought everyone knew.
I was at the 2002 Aaron’s 499 (NASCAR race) @ Talladega Superspeedway. There was probably around 180,000 people in attendance.
I was at Paul Simon’s free concert on the Great Lawn of Central Park on August 15th, 1991, which had an estimated attendance of 750,000. I find that rather hard to believe but it was definitely an enormous crowd.
I was also in Central Park for the 20th Anniversary Earth Day gathering in 1990, which was a very large gathering due to the music festival (I now forget the lineup of bands). I remember Christopher Reeve jokingingly threatening to don his Superman cape and fly into the trees to take out some people perched in the branches, as they had made several annoucements over the PA not to do that as it might damage the trees, which would be rather counter to the spirit of Earth Day. (It would get worse as the Earth Day crowd, as a whole, would end up leave an embarrassing amount of litter and trash.)
I’ve flown into the World’s busiest airport.