How many people really came to downtown Evansville for the Eclipse?

EVANSVILLE, In. (WEHT)- Officials are sharing numbers about just how popular of a destination the River City was.

The Executive Director for Downtown Evansville, Adam Trinkel, says throughout the day, 17,000 people were downtown. Trinkel explains, “at the height of the eclipse, 9,000 people were downtown”.

Trinkel says artificial intelligence was used to figure out how many that number was, more specifically, “Placer AI”.

“It’s a location analytics platform, and we’ve been using it since last year. What it allows us to do is draw different boundaries or perimeters around an area and better see how many people are in that area at a certain time.”

Trinkel says that 9,000 that were downtown was right on par with what officials were expecting and some of those wanted eclipse branded merchandise.

The River City Cafe was one place that was experiencing the benefits of that consumer spending.

“Probably the busiest we’ve ever been. Even busier than our Christmas season,” said employee Caitlin Hurt. “We sold out of our eclipse stuff. We sold a ton of our eclipse drink. It was very busy but a lot of fun.”

For Evansville residents, it was not hard to see why people would travel to chase the feeling.

“Now that I have experienced the full eclipse, I can now see why people would spend the money to go where it was going to be and share that moment,” said Justin Merritt.

Trinkel said people from 27 states and seven different countries showed up to Evansville for that moment.

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