Washington, DC's Pennsylvania Avenue after the bin Laden announcement

[Cirrus]

Unless you've been living under a rock the past 12 hours, you know that Osama bin Laden is dead. As President Obama made his speech last night a crowd began to gather on Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House front door. By the time his speech ended, the crowd numbered in the thousands. I hopped bikeshare (by far the best way get there) and went down, to snap a few pictures and soak in the atmosphere.

If you've seen the news, you might have heard that there was a lot of cheering and chanting. There was, but it was by a relatively small minority of people there. Mostly people were just there to be there, to be together with their countrymen at an important time.

Getting good pictures was extremely difficult. I didn't think to bring a tripod, the lighting was awful, and it was crowded. Whatever. Better to have fuzzy pictures than none at all. Scroll down to see them.

[Cirrus]

Panorama. Scroll ---------------->

[diskojoe]

man, it looks like NOLA after the saints won the superbowl. i saw some of this on the news last night.

[Cirrus]

It was obviously an emotional moment for these two. I wonder what their story is.



You can see there were a few people milling about on the White House porch. Probably just Secret Service.





Lots of TV crews, from all over the world.



These guys were German.



He made it all the way up. Security didn't care.



Anything for a view above the crowd.



That's all, folks.

[animatedmartian]

Wow, it's like a huge flash mob. Good pictures despite not having a tripod.

[OhioGuy]

I went down to the White House as well. Indeed the gathering was mostly of people just wanting to be there to check out the scene and be amongst one another. The noisy celebrations were mostly young college students who were out drinking & smoking weed and/or looking for an excuse to go a little wild on a Sunday night. I still don't have my Comcast hooked up and as a result had no knowledge of Obama's announcement or what was happening at the White House until I received a text message from my sister asking if DC was going crazy? So I checked the CNN website on my cell phone, saw the news, and decided to get out of bed and head down to the White House to see everything in person since I couldn't follow it online or on tv. Quite the experience for my first weekend as a DC resident!

[Jasonhouse]

^Literally thousands of people appeared there within 30, maybe 45 minutes. I remember seeing the first report of the crowd on CNN before the speech started and there was like 100 people there, tops. A few minutes after the speech they showed the area again and there were clearly several thousand people already on the scene.

Oh and brownie points to local DC media, who made a point in their reporting to mention that people came to the White House via bicycle! yay lol

[jg6544]

In 1865, that window above the door on the North Portico was where Abraham Lincoln appeared to speak to another cheering crowd on the night Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

[xzmattzx]

Interesting. You were fast to get these up!

[Yankee]

America... Fuck yeah!

[Nightsky]

Good initiative to go there and take photos!

[Okayyou]

Always great to see first hand accounts. Thanks for posting.

[Coldrsx]

It looks like there is a raving mad KKK on top of the whitehouse watching covertly.


(http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5184/...423129a1_b.jpg)

[shivtim]

I saw an article that said the bikeshare spiked to more than 550 users between 10PM and 2AM, as compared to only 105 users during the same time period a week earlier.