Sanders drew an enthusiastic crowd, though the candidate acknowledged that he faces an uphill battle in New York. Photograph by Mary Altaffer/AP

Over the years and decades, quite a few tub-thumping radicals have stood up in Washington Square Park and railed at the world, but few, if any, have attracted a crowd like the one Bernie Sanders attracted on Wednesday evening. By mid-afternoon, the New York Police Department had cordoned off the park and the blocks around it. From Houston Street to Eighth Street, and from Sixth Avenue to Broadway, the area was sealed, and inside the barricades long lines of people were waiting to clear security. The campaign later estimated that twenty-seven thousand people attended, in all.

On the corner of West Third Street and LaGuardia Place, guys were selling official Sanders campaign T-shirts for twenty dollars, and posters saying “The Revolution Is On Fire” for ten. Down the block, someone else was selling less-official “Feel the Bern” T-shirts for ten dollars. A middle-aged couple in front of me stopped to look at one, but went with a “Fuck Trump: Keep America Great” shirt instead.

On the west side of the park, at the corner of Washington Place, a tall man was carrying a handwritten sign that said “Not Me, Us. Not I, We. We Can Win.” He told me that his name was Murray Herman, and that he was forty years old and a veteran of antiwar protests and the Occupy Wall Street movement. “In Presidential elections, I’m usually supporting third-party candidates,” he said. This year, he was making an exception for Sanders. “It’s not a campaign: it’s more of a movement,” he said. As I went to move on, he stopped me and asked if I knew that Bill Clinton had made two highly paid speeches in the United Arab Emirates at the same time the oil-rich country was asking the State Department, which was then headed by Clinton’s wife, to approve the construction of a screening facility at Abu Dhabi’s airport for passengers flying to the United States. I said that I thought I recalled something about the story. (The Wall Street Journal reported on it last December.) The request was approved, Herman said, adding, “Ask your readers why.”

By the time I got into the park, the rock band Vampire Weekend had finished its set, and, from a stage that had been set up in front of the Washington Square Arch, Thomas Duane, who was the first openly gay member of the New York City Council and the New York State Senate, was lauding Sanders’s record on gays in the military, same-sex marriage, and other issues. “The thing about Bernie—Bernie’s just always against everyone who’s against me,” Duane told the crowd. “Hillary, she’s never against the people who are against me. You gotta talk her into it.”

Duane was followed by a number of other speakers, including the actor Rosario Dawson and the film director Spike Lee. There were also representatives of labor groups, led by J. P. Patafio, a vice-president of the Transport Workers Union Local 100. Earlier in the day, Sanders had appeared on a picket line with members of the Communication Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electric Workers, which went on strike against Verizon on Wednesday to protest benefit cuts and outsourcing. “When I saw Sanders come to my union hall today, speaking to my members, it was a great thing,” Patafio said, in a pronounced New York accent. “Then we went with Sanders to the Verizon building. Billion-dollar Verizon. Fuck Verizon.”

A large group of twentysomethings standing in front of me cheered wildly and started chanting “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” They didn’t have to wait much longer for him to appear. At 8:20 P.M., Jane Sanders walked onto the stage with her husband a few steps behind her, wearing a dark union bomber jacket. “There are a lot of people here tonight,” he said, after looking around and waving. “Jane and I left New York City when we were kids. It is great to be back.” Someone from the group in front of me screamed, “We love you, Bernie!”

For the next hour or so, Sanders delivered his usual stump speech. In the course of the campaign, he has expanded it a bit to include material on African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and other minorities, as well as on issues like fracking and mass incarceration. But the core of Sanders’s message is exactly the same as it was last April, when he announced that he was running: that the American political and economic systems are hopelessly broken, that it will take a “political revolution” to make things right, and that this redemptive outcome is achievable. “Despite what others may tell you, yes, we can change the status quo,” Sanders declared.

Some of the Vermont senator’s patter is so familiar that his supporters now know it by heart. When he asked if anybody knew what the average donation to his campaign was, the entire crowd shouted, “Twenty-seven dollars!” When he brought up Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street companies, loud boos echoed across the park. He also took Clinton to task for supporting free-trade agreements, which he said had cost America many well-paying jobs; for consorting with Henry Kissinger; and for having a super PAC that has raised tens of millions of dollars from special interests. But he saved his harshest vitriol for Verizon, Big Pharma, the Koch Brothers, the Walton family (the founders of Walmart), and, of course, Wall Street. “This campaign is sending a message to corporate America: you cannot have it all!” he said.

Sanders did dress up some of his applause lines for his audience. For months, he has been saying that Clinton’s speeches for Goldman Sachs must have been corkers to have merited fees of more than two hundred thousand dollars each. Now he added, “It must be a speech that could solve most of the world’s problems. It must be a speech written in Shakespearean prose.” He also added a few local references. “Check out how much tuition was at City University, City College, Brooklyn College fifty years ago: virtually free,” he said. “If we could have virtually free tuition fifty years ago in America at our great public universities and colleges, we damn well can do it today.”

With his white hair shining in the light of the illuminated arch, Sanders at times resembled a radical preacher of the old school. Adding to the feeling of a revival meeting was the fact that part of the P.A. system, which was relaying the speech to all corners of the park, seemed to be operating on a delay of a second or two. So when Sanders said, “We do not represent Wall Street. We do not want their money,” his voice seemed to bounce off the Bobst Library and echo down LaGuardia Place, to SoHo, Tribeca, and the financial district itself.

Toward the end of his speech, Sanders acknowledged that he faces an uphill battle in New York. “It’s going to be a tough primary for us,” he said, citing Clinton’s record as a U.S. senator from the state, as well as the fact that independent voters, who form a large part of his following, can’t cast ballots in the primary. “But you know what I think when I look out at the thousands of people who are here tonight, the thousands of people we saw in Buffalo, and Syracuse, and Rochester? I think we’ve got a surprise for the establishment,” he said. “I think that if we have a large voter turnout on Tuesday we’re gonna win this thing.” With that, Sanders thanked the crowd, hugged his wife, and disappeared under the arch to the strains of David Bowie’s “Starman.”