Lawn chairs and blankets began sprouting like weeds on yards and sidewalks along Central Street in Evanston as early as Friday in anticipation of Monday afternoon’s annual 4th of July parade.
The earlier they came, the better the view-and the shade-for the spectators getting ready for the 73rd annual parade.
“They come to reserve their spots. A lot of them don’t live on Central. They come early,” said Geraldine Gaull, 69, who has lived along Central for nearly four years.
As he has done for 20 years, Gaull’s son, Gerald Leibforth, 53, will walk five blocks from his home to attend the parade. He will be accompanied by his wife and two children.
The annual early sprouting of the chairs and blankets also occurred in many other locations, especially Chicago’s Grant Park, for Sunday night’s celebration.
Virtually every community in the Chicago area either has staged or is readying parades, fireworks, concerts or a combination of those celebrations.
Evenston’s parade will start at 2 p.m. and run along Central from Central Park Avenue to Dyche Stadium.
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Behind the scenes, Evanston’s “Backlot” neighborhood of some 60 homes has been working on a big parade float, as it has done for decades.
Pieces of the float made by groups of neighborhood families will be assembled during a pancake breakfast Monday.
“The rest of Evanston doesn’t know about this neighborhood or what we do,” Backlot resident Seymour Schwartz said.
“When people move here, some warm up to it right away, others a little slower.”
This year’s float theme is “children’s toys” from infants to adults and includes everything from a rattle to a boom box.
An old green Volkswagen bug is being decorated like a Big Wheel with a blue-and-orange seat. A large orange-red wheel will pull the float.
For the last week, two families have been fashioning a TV with video games and a rotating screen for the float, which also will include joysticks and video game characters.
In Grant Park, visitors to the city’s annual outdoor smorgasbord, Taste of Chicago, laid down blankets, set up plastic picnic tables and lawn chairs, and roped off areas hours in advance of a 7:30 p.m. concert and a 9:30 p.m. fireworks show.
No major problems were reported Sunday at the lakefront festivities, which, according to the Mayor’s Office of Special Events, attracted more than a million people.
Dressed in bathing suits and shorts, Brigid Brookhart and Vickie Brand, both of Streamwood, showed up at 11 a.m. for the fifth consecutive year with a cooler full of sandwiches, a radio, suntan lotion, and a plastic tarp in case of rain. For the concert, they laid blankets in front of the snow fence surrounding the Petrillo Music Shell.
“It’s a great place to watch people and make friends with the people around you,” said Brand, 28.
“And the fireworks are unbelievable,” said Brookhart, 29.
As people played with Frisbees, read books, napped and listened to radios, Chicago resident Michelle Kawa, 40, a six-year veteran of the festival, arrived six hours before the concert, sat in a lawn chair and played with a bubble gun in her space marked by a yellow papier-mache dinosaur on a pole.
The dinosaur acts as a beacon for her friends, who gathered up delicacies from the food festival.
“One time, I was in the bathroom and I heard people say, `We’re sitting near the yellow dinosaur.’ I thought it was great-I’m doing a public service.”
While early birds basked in the afternoon sunshine, others gorged on food from 70 restaurants, including pizza, crawfish, artichokes, etouffee, turtle soup, shrimp on a stake and deep sea nuggets.
Sisters Nicki and Shenika Mcgill of Chicago enjoyed the egg rolls most of all. They also took advantage of the 90-foot Ferris wheel, this year’s newest attraction.
“You see everything, the whole city, the lake,” they said of the view at the top.
Taste of Chicago, which attracted some 250,000 people on its opening day Saturday, runs through Sunday. About 2.75 million people are expected to attend.
Cheryl Stokes, hailing from California, timed her business trip to Chicago to coincide with Taste. She and her sister, Teri, who lives in the Wrigleyville neighborhood, were at the Taste to “eat and eat and eat and eat.”