May 1 nuggets

The impressive photos of the afternoon are the aerial shots of a solid string of marchers extending across all lanes of Wilshire Boulevard for a couple of miles. At 6 pm the leading edge is still crossing through Hancock Park, just a block from Mayor Villaraigosa's residence at Getty House. Villaraigosa is speaking in English and Spanish at the end of the line at Wilshire and La Brea, saying he is proud that hundreds of thousands marched in peace "asking to be part of the American dream." Cardinal Mahony is there in a white t-shirt and a Cathedral baseball cap. The LAPD is sticking for now to a ridiculous count of 75,000 along Wilshire; that will certainly be revised upwards by at least triple.

♦ Fox-11 stayed with live coverage through the late afternoon, mostly in English and some in Spanish, while other stations aired Oprah, Judge Judy, etc.
♦ KVEA-52's coverage is under the banner Marcha Historica.
♦ NBC-4 page of links to galleries, videos and stories.
♦ Times reporters are filing blog-style to a chronological roundup of street scenes.
♦ Many restaurants and other businesses (but not most) closed on the Eastside and the Westside, and NBC-4 reported on business owners in Boyle Heights who said they were threatened if they stayed open.
♦ Banners hung from bridges on the Pasadena Freeway: "The servers are down. Go home" and "LA closed for business."
♦ 70,000 students were reported absent from LAUSD.
♦ Except for march areas, traffic was lighter than normal all over town, especially on the freeways. Buses also crossed the city much emptier than a normal day; I saw a completely empty eastbound Wilshire Rapid bus in West Los Angeles.
♦ KFI's John and Ken insisted that no "real people" were affected in any way by the day's boycott, marches, lighter traffic, major street closures, business closures, etc.
♦ La Bloga's contributors put up a special post focused on May 1.
♦ Street-level video of the downtown march at Stickam.com.
♦ OC Weekly looks at rally activist Nativo Lopez, "a calculating man who never met a Latino cause he didn’t immediately want to represent before cameras. Now he’s back, and many Orange County Latino activists involved in the resurgent pro-immigrant movement aren’t thrilled."

Photo: Downtown marchers via Associated Press/Oscar Hidalgo