You wouldn’t have had to fight for parking at noon-thirty on Wednesday August 13 when Ernie Chiles and I flew over the Isle Cape Girardeau Casino.
I didn’t look at it under a magnifying glass, but I DID blow it up a bit on the screen to let me count about 244 cars, two buses and what might be an RV in the parking lots. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)
Here are some earlier posts about the casino and shoe factory area.
- Aerial photos of land clearing
- Photos and history of the shoe factory
- The neighborhood around the shoe factory
- Morrison Ice and Fuel falls to casino
- Panoramas of the Casino Aug. 17, 2011, and Aug. 3, 2012
- The casino at night
- Bingo lot vs casino
Downtown parking
I looked at a series of frames that showed the downtown shopping area parking lots from the city lot south of Independence to the two lots north of Broadway, plus Water Street and east of Spanish Street. The photos were taken on the same pass, just minutes before the Casino photo. I counted about 210 vehicles ion the downtown shopping district.
[I cheated a bit. Because of the angle, I couldn’t see cars parked on the east side of Main, so I doubled the number of cars parked on the west side, assuming that the same number of parking spaces were occupied on that side.]
(Sorry for the cloud shadows at the top left. I tried get Ernie to lasso them and drag them out of the way, but he said that kind of thing was out of his pay grade.
It would be interesting to know how many of the cars in both locations were owned by employees rather than customers.
aaa….The Cape Casino probably does have bigger crowd at night. Who is up and moving at 12:30 in the morning anyway? 210 or 244 cars is more than I thought, heck that is almost 500 cars in the Cape river area and to say nothing of the bus riding people, train, subway commuters. Mississippi River boat travelers, and people flying into town. I would conservatively put the number at 1 million people in the downtown cape area. Scoff if you like, but I used to have the job of counting the people in the Washington DC area from the air so I do know what a “million man march” looks like.
Terry,
Is that why all the crowd reports said “10 people” because that’s all the fingers and toes you had?
The parking lot at Broadway and Main Street opened in 1961.
http://www.semissourian.com/blogs/flynch/entry/39373