Maybe the Republicans brought their convention to New York to show that the city is safe. Maybe they did it to exploit 9/11. Maybe they did it to appeal to their moderate wing, while their neo-conservative revolutionaries could say they marched into the heart of liberal territory.

Or maybe they did it to stir up massive resistance throughout the city. Anyway, that’s what they did, as anyone could have predicted.

Boston was nothing like this. It was a Democratic town welcoming the Democratic Party, in the Democratic nominee’s home state. The locals were friendly to the out-of-towners. There were so many parties that even I could get into a couple of them. And the protests were miniscule and somewhat difficult to interpret. The most coherent statement I heard from a far-left demonstrator that whole week was, in effect, “We have to stop Bush. And after that, we have to stop Kerry.”

But in New York, we’ve had helicopters hovering over various parts of the city for days, especially Union Square. Newspaper columnists have been begging demonstrators not to get out of hand. City officials have spent weeks going back and forth over where the protest march would be held. And this city seems suddenly to be playing host to the sort of aging hippies and young counter-culturalists that I haven’t seen since I had to step over them in the streets of Berkeley in the early 1980s. As my friend, comedian Bruce Cherry, put it, “Every blond dreadlock in America is here.”

Then came the march Sunday. It headed north up Seventh Avenue from 14th Street to 34th Street (where demonstrators could yell at Madison Square Garden; there are no delegates there yet, and, as far as I can tell, the demonstrators were just yelling at an empty building, unless someone was in their vacuuming), cut right for a couple of long blocks to Fifth Avenue and turned right again to loop back down to 14th Street at Union Square.

The protest organizers said 400,000 people participated. The New York City Police Department estimates it at more like 100,000. Let’s just agree it was large. When I saw that at least some of the people at the front of the demonstration had made it to the end at Union Square, I ran back to Seventh Avenue to see that the back of the march (halted to a crawl by an accumulation of mergers and stalls ahead – a process with which New York commuters are familiar anyway) had only made it as far as 19th Street. So that’s at least 35 short blocks and two long blocks of marchers that I saw first-hand, about two-and-a-half miles worth – not counting stragglers on the side streets.

By the way, that didn’t leave a lot of New Yorkers to populate the rest of the town. At 12:45 p.m., when the protestors had already started, the streets were abandoned by my apartment in Brooklyn. Of course, in New York, the statement “The streets were abandoned” is a relative one. There’s always someone wandering around out there, even at 4 a.m. But along my part of Atlantic Avenue, there were so few people and so little traffic that I could actually have slept in my apartment without earplugs. A ghost town!

What is one to make of it all? I have a naive tendency to presume that people know what they’re doing. So I assume the Republicans saw this coming and even counted on it in some way. I mean, after all, no one could be foolish enough to think they could march into an unfriendly area without encountering lingering resistance.

It’s not like Bush did that in, say, Baghdad.