The City Transformed

Last night was the 4th Atlanta Beltline Lantern Parade.  Somehow I had never heard of this event until last year, when Iain and I went without knowing what to expect.  What I remember from last year was how disorienting it was, seeing skyscrapers lit up against the night sky in the distance but not really knowing where we were.  Last year we had picked up some paper lanterns at Target and put battery-powered LED lights inside, but we didn't know we needed to have them on poles.  This year we decorated our lanterns and had them on 4-foot poles.

My after-dark photos didn't come out very well, but I did get some before the parade started, when the crowd was gathering at Irwin and Krog.  There was the women carrying the giant green fish ("I'm just carrying it," she told the woman who asked her to pose with it for a photo.)

There were lots of people with really big, illuminated hats.  Some of them probably were from the Krewe of the Grateful Gluttons, the hosts of the parade, and others probably were people who had made one at one of the Krewe's classes.  ("They have classes?" Iain asked, incredulous.  As in, "you knew they had classes, and you didn't get me into one of them?")

There were lots of large paper lanterns, some purchased, some created.  

And there were the Krewe's giant illuminated puppets.  Last year they led the parade, but this year there were just too many people.  By the time they headed out of the parking lot at Irwin and Krog there already were hundreds of people ahead of them on the trail.

What was amazing this time was how many people there were -- not just walking, but lining the trail, or watching from porches, balconies, windows, or roofs of adjacent buildings.  There were people everywhere.  There were people flying illuminated remote control aircraft, people with dogs or kids or bikes, people with folding chairs.  There were so many people in the parade itself that I think many participants stepped to the side to watch for a while.

By the time we got to the parade's end at Virginia & Monroe, we had moved to near the front.  We followed the crowd into Piedmont Park and listened to the band for a while, then headed back toward home.  From the bridge on Virginia Avenue that goes over the trail we could see the crowd of people still walking that went on as far as we could see.

As we were approaching the end of the route, I heard a young woman talking to her companion, saying "This is why I love my neighborhood."  

Exactly.