I’ve been at my office and schools when practically noone’s been there. What about you?
Northwest Washington DC, the business district. About 3AM.
Deserted.
London Euston. There’d been a bomb-scare but somehow I’d missed the cordons.
I figured out pretty quickly that something was wrong but it was very scary.
Also any London tube station, no matter how criminally crowded it gets during the rush hours, will have a calm time. These times can be at the oddest hours of the day or night, but you can quite easily have the place to yourself. One’s footsteps fill the air and you try desperately not to think about American Werewolf.
Oops. Too late. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeek…
Next time I’m down there alone I’ll start singing “Blue Moon” down the long echoey corridors. That should freak out a few commuters.
Dallas, Texas around 2 - 3 in the morning. I was hitching (well, not hitching on purpose; I started out walking and, soon enough without once raising a thumb for help, I ended up with enough rides to get me to Dallas from New Orleans in about two days) and ended up in J.R.'s town with no one around. Except one creepy guy who kept calling out “Hey, hey you! Hey!” I walked faster. He walked faster. It was all very merry. And then, the next morning, I bought a plane ticket home. (I didn’t think I had a thumb big enough to hitch a ride on a plane. Not even Sissy Hankshaw thumbs. Nor did I have a towel for a passing spaceship. But I digress.)
I worked the graveyard security shift at DIA during the year I spent getting my head together between high school and college. Not as a baggage screener, mind you, where I might have had a chance to actually see the random traveler, but as plainclothes security in the concourses.
It’s a very strange thing to be in an international airport at 3:00 in the morning and not see another human being anywhere. Granted, I often worked Concourse C, which was – and still is, I believe – home to the smaller carriers that don’t operate all hours of the night. Still, it’s quite weird to be in a building that’s obviously made to accomodate a whole lot of traffic and be all by yourself for hours on end.
Ever read (or see the TV adaptation) of Stephen King’s The Langoliers? Kind of like that. Spooky.
Yeah I had to spend the night at O’Hare airport once because I had like 8 hours between the time my ride dropped me off and my AM flight. I wasn’t allowed to check in for the next day’s flight so I couldn’t access any vending machines or anything inside. They apparently don’t adjust the A/C at night so I spent the wee hours of the morning pushing my Smart Cart full of luggage back and forth through several miles of airport trying to stay warm. I think around 4AM I managed to convince a janitor to get me a soda from his breakroom so I would have some caffeine to keep me going. A surreal and interesting experience.
Completely alone in a metro station in Madrid.
Downtown San Francisco, two hours after the Loma Prieta 'quake.
Just me and a few cops shooing me away.
killjoys.
Where was everybody else? I lived in the Sunset at the time and there were tons of people out on the streets.
Downtown was ghost city - it was after nightfall - may have been midnight.
I took the central freeway and was forced onto the surface instead of the Embarcadero - saw the failure of the piers (little rubble stacks at the base of the columns).
Just about nobody along the waterfront - quite eerie - almost silent.
Didn’t try to get to the Marina - don’t remember which route I took back (I am also in the Sunset), but it was probably Broadway.
Walking along the waterfront in Hong Kong early in the morning shortly before Christmas.
They really decorate for Xmas–lots of neon all over the hotels. Pretty cool, actually.
Ginza in Tokyo, late at night, during a heavy snowfall. I wasn’t totally alone; my gaijin friends and I were having a snowball fight. But there was no one else out anywhere. We played in the middle of the street, with no cars moving anywhere, and our shouts (and snowballs) bouncing off the quiet buildings.
It was really good to be 15. And yikes! That’s half my life ago.
When I drove a college taxi during summer breaks, I’d usually come home around 4am, so I saw Boston/Cambridge deserted on quite a few occasions.
Normally, the area around Shibuya Station in Tokyo is so crowded it looks like there’s an outdoor rock concert going on somewhere, but if you go at 6-7am on a Sunday, it’s like the Times Square scene at the beginning of Vanilla Sky. Kinda spooky.
Can’t resist piling on to the last two: 2AM on a Sunday night/Monday morning, after a tremendous typhoon-season downpour, in Roppongi, Tokyo. Even the ever-present massage-y girls had vanished.
(And to accent Sublight’s point about Shibuya, tourists often make a point of photographing the vast crowds of people. Hard to imagine it deserted.)
LAX- After a bomb scare.
Hamburg Hauptbahnhof (central railway station) at 4 a.m. My bus from London had just gotten in - and I had to wait 3 hours for the first train to take me where I wanted to go. I think I was the only one in the entire station!!
The Olympic Stadium (80,000 seats) with no one - not even a security guard - around.
Scary!
I’ve been in Manhattan twice pretty much by myself. Once was a Wednesday night, around 2 am and there was me and another guy I was with and one or two taxis and that’s it. Drove most of the way down Broadway only seeing a couple of people.
Also on one Sunday morning around 8 or so I was near MSG and there was no one around then either. It’s kind of strange to see NYC empty.
Sao Paulo, Brazil late at night. Right outside the Bramah Brewery, walking from a bus stop. The streets were deserted (does that mean they were covered in cakes and pies? No. Move along now…)
Also Brasilia. From what I hear, that place is always a ghost town. Very weird. Six lane mega-highways everywhere with no traffic. You could play football in the median with no problem.
Anyplace I’ve ever been alone had a population of one, by definition. 