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Tuesday, July 4, 2006
Peachtree pulls Atlanta together
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
What became Atlanta grew from a railroad village known as Terminus, and sometimes it still seems we don’t so much live here as we’ve simply stopped off. We come to this place to work, and when the workday is done we head for our respective far-flung suburbs, and sometimes our big city seems a mere waystation. New York and Chicago and even L.A. have identifiable thumbprints, but occasionally even longtime residents are heard to wonder: What exactly is Atlanta?
In case you’re ever asked, you don’t really need to say anything. You have only to point to one day, one street, one harmonic convergence. You have only to show someone the Peachtree Road Race. As much as any one thing can signify a populace so vast and diverse, the Peachtree does.
“There’s not another sporting event like it,” said the famous Atlantan Bill Curry on Tuesday. He was standing outside the ritzy Park Place apartments, where he lives somewhat cheek-by-jowl with the even more famous Elton John. Curry, who played in the Super Bowl and coached in a Sugar Bowl, was helping tend his grandchildren while his daughter Kristin ran the race. And Curry’s observation, while true, isn’t quite the whole truth.
The Peachtree Road Race is a contest, yes, but it is something far greater. It’s a celebration of a national holiday, a confluence of demographics, a clangor of happy sounds. The genius of the Peachtree administrators was to make their creation more than just a road race, to offer entrée to those who’d prefer to walk, to fill the one street for which Atlanta is known worldwide with 55,000 bodies of various types on the Fourth of July.
Were the Peachtree merely a competition, there would be no room for the corner-cutters who cover only part of the 6.2 miles but claim the T-shirt as their just reward. Seen Tuesday: A man with an entry number in the 50,000s — technically his group wouldn’t start for another half-hour — walking alongside a group of obviously dedicated runners bearing numbers in the 100s. If the Peachtree didn’t have such a good-humored feel, you’d call such a thing cheating, but the idea for all but a handful of entrants isn’t to win the race; it’s simply to take part in the one ritual that makes Atlanta Atlanta.
At the Cathedral of St. Philip, Rev. Sam Candler was dispensing holy water from a silver bowl to the runners and walkers, shouting “Blessings to you!” (Being a full-service church, the Cathedral also offered holy water through a sprayer.) Said Rev. Candler, who has performed this merry rite for seven years: “There’s such a glorious conglomeration of people, every color and kind. The way we figure it, when we bless these people we’ve truly blessed America.”
There aren’t many times when we, being an aggregation of transplants, can actually say we feel like Atlantans, but along those 6.2 miles of that signature street on the Fourth of the July it’s impossible to feel like anything but. The Peachtree brings out the great and small, the swift and the ponderous, and throws them together in a splash of sweat and a swirl of flag-waving. Every July 4th, we’re treated to the essence of Atlanta on joyous display. It is, not to get all corny, a beautiful thing.
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