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FROM NEW YORK When we took a look at the attendance at Bon Jovi’s Great Lawn performance last week, the crowd of 48,000 was dwarfed by the park’s great concerts of yore. Regulations now limit attendance at any one event to 75,000, but photos of the packed crowd prompted The New York Times to look at the legitimacy of claims that concerts like Garth Brooks' 1997 show attracted 750,000 people to the North Meadow.

It turns out that 750,000 was probably a bit of an overestimate. Doug Blonsky, president of the Central Park Conservancy and a former city parks administrator, had this to say to The Times regarding past attendance figures: “You would get in a room with the producer, with a police official, and a person from parks, and someone would say, ‘What does it look like to you?’… The producer would say, ‘I need it to be higher than the last one.’ That’s the kind of science that went into it." MORE >>

Central Park

NEWS 07.14.08 5:00 PM

Bon Jovi's Central Park Show Launches Week of All-Star Game Celebrations

FROM NEW YORK Festivities for Tuesday's Major League Baseball All-Star Game kicked into high gear on Saturday with Bon Jovi’s highly anticipated concert on Central Park’s Great Lawn. An estimated 48,500 people (many of them from New Jersey) attended the show, which was free for those who didn't get their tickets from scalpers.

Though plans were only finalized two weeks ahead of time, fans turned out in droves to pick up tickets the day after the July 1 announcement. All 60,000 tickets were given away almost instantly, but an extra 7,500 were distributed in the days leading up to the show to extend the opportunity to other fans. Many die-hards had already shelled out as much as $1,000 to scalpers for the free pass, which didn’t even guarantee admittance. Despite the 67,500 tickets, the Department of Parks & Recreation was adamant that only 50,000 would be allowed to attend the show, so the particularly anxious started lining up the day before. MORE >>

Bon Jovi, Central Park, Major League Baseball, All-Star Game

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