See City Hall turn pink while more than 100,000 fill the streets for Women’s March

Market Street became a sea of protesters Saturday as tens of thousands of people marched from Civic Center to the Embarcadero in a show of support for women and other disenfranchised groups, and City Hall joined in by turning pink for a night.

The peaceful affair was one of several marches in the Bay Area and roughly 50 in California expressing solidarity with the Women’s March in Washington D.C., which itself drew a crowd of hundreds of thousands.

Crowd sizes are always difficult to estimate, but San Francisco march organizers were expecting about 60,000 people and initial counts put the turnout at somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000, women, men, and children despite the rain.

Although virtually everyone showed up to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump the previous day, the march was technically supposed to be a general expression of support for women’s rights not directed at any particular politician.

However, the signs attendees towed left little doubt who individual marchers had in mind.

Although the two-hour Civic Center rally (featuring folk singer Joan Baez, among other speakers) and two-hour march tied up Market Street and almost overwhelmed BART and MUNI, the night passed mostly without incident, and no arrests were reported.

It’s hard to appreciate the size of the crowd without seeing it, but luckily social media provides many, many visual testimonials:

Ed Lee

• Crowd Demonstrate Against Trump [Chronicle]
• More Than 100,000 March [SFist]