When Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin announced a national day of mass mobilization on April 5, I was thrilled when I realized it fell on a rare Saturday we didn’t have a show scheduled – it meant that my staff and I could easily participate in the event.
Local Indivisible chapters, along with the CNY Solidarity Coalition announced that the local rally would be held at Forman Park on E. Genesee Street, which is only a half mile from the club. With parking being scarce in that area, they were encouraging everyone to meet in other locations and walk to the rally together. I knew from talking to our guests that many planned to attend, so we decided to host an official meet-up at the 443. I figured it would be helpful for people to have a home base to fill up their water bottles and use the restrooms before heading to the rally, and we decided to set up a free station with coffee, cookies, and donut holes so attendees could just help themselves.
Maria, Ryan, and Megan set up the coffee and cookies station.
We also gave the first 100 people a free cowbell noisemaker for the rally.
Local musicians Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers and Wendy Ramsey manned the check-in station and gave out cowbells.
I made a Facebook event to promote the meet-up, and by the day of the event, we had over 500 people interested… HOLY SMOKES!
We ended up with a packed house of enthusiastic and friendly folks anxious to show up and make their voices heard in the fight for democracy. Dozens of our regular guests showed up, along with plenty of people who had never been to our place.
Everyone was so kind and friendly.
We opened our doors as a community service, but one of our early guests insisted we put a jar out for donations, and we were blown away at how generous everyone was – we ended up with enough to cover what we spent on the event without coming out of pocket, which was amazing. We hadn’t planned on opening the bar up, but some folks asked for drinks, so we happily obliged – and that helped, too.
At around 12:15pm, we were full with a big crowd outside, so we started organizing everyone to head to the park for the 1pm rally.
Maria and Megan led the group while I stayed behind to clear the room and lock everything up.
The girls estimated we picked up another 100-200 people on the sidewalk who hadn’t made it into the bar yet. It was cold, blustery, and wet, but the enthusiasm in the crowd was palpable.
As we arrived at the park, the wind died down and the sun even peeked out a bit.
Our very own intrepid sound tech, Dave Kane, donated his time to run the sound for the scheduled speakers at the event.
It was an INCREDIBLE day, and the experience left us all energized and encouraged. Everything is pretty scary right now, but realizing how many people are fighting to protect the very foundation of our country was powerful.
Worldwide, it’s estimated that 5 million people turned out, and organizers estimated we had about 4000 here in Syracuse… WOOO-HOOOOO!
We’re getting a lot of inquiries about whether we’ll do this again, and the answer is a resounding HELL YES!!
However –
It depends on where and when local organizers hold the next rally. We’re within walking distance from Clinton Square, City Hall, and Forman Park, but no announcements have been made about a location for the next event.
There was an announcement at the April 5 rally that the next one will be on May 1, which is a Thursday, so that will take us out of the mix – we have a show that night, and since it’s a weeknight people will need to come straight from work anyway. The next national event is April 19, organized by the 50501 movement, but the closest events right now are in Rochester and Buffalo.
We’re hoping there will be some rallies later this year that we can participate in. Even if a show is scheduled, we can easily manage the pre-rally meet-up during the day. Now that we’ve got one under our belt, we know what to expect… and we have ideas on how to make it even better. 🙂
BIG THANKS to photographer Matt Hofmann for capturing the day! You can find his work HERE.
Thank you to everyone who joined us, and we’ll keep you posted!
