Erica C. Barnett was also at the Monorail party, where she ran into Cindi Laws, sitting at the Trattoria Mitchelli bar and wearing a jaunty pink suit. Asked how she felt, Laws said she felt “bitter.” She continued: “There’s a vast anti-monorail conspiracy at the state, county, and city levels to bring down this project with Rovian-Atwater-Rush Limbaugh tactics.” She sighed and said, “I’ve always been an idealist, an indomitable optimist… It will be hard to get that back.”

And that was before the first numbers came out, showing the monorail going down 67% to 33%. There was no reaction in the room when the numbers came, Barnett reports. Everyone had already assumed the monorail was dead.