For better or worse, the days of a full-blown Lantern Parade on the BeltLine’s Eastside Trail appear to be a thing of the past.
On the bright side, the luminous Atlanta tradition—one of the city’s longest-running events now, in fact—is set in stone for early May in Southwest Atlanta, with a more eventful, celebratory schedule than ever.
Described as a “beloved Atlanta celebration of creativity, community, and light” with giant glowing puppets and marching bands, the grassroots parade had humble beginnings in 2010, when a few hundred creative souls marched with LED lanterns down the shoddy dirt railroad corridor that’s become the Eastside Trail—with no spectators on the sidelines. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Lantern Parade was drawing estimated crowds of 70,000 annually to the Eastside Trail, solidify itself as a unique local tradition alongside the Dogwood Festival, Streets Alive, and Inman Park Festival, among others.
The pandemic paused the parade for two years, but in 2022 it reemerged on the flipside of town, illuminating a section of the BeltLine’s Westside Trail beginning in Adair Park. That’s where it will return May 11.
The Lantern Parade’s Eastside Trail takeover. Shutterstock
When asked this week if the Lantern Parade might one day return to the BeltLine’s most patronized stretch of pathway, a project representative provided the following statement: “The Eastside Trail has grown significantly since the Lantern Parade was created in 2010, as has the parade itself, which currently attracts tens of thousands,” reads an email to Urbanize Atlanta. “To maintain the integrity of the event while also considering the daily activity and traffic of the highly traveled Eastside Trail, the event has transitioned to the Westside Trail.”
That doesn’t mean the Eastside Trail will see no lanterns in 2024.
Sometime this fall, the BeltLine will present the second incarnation of “Where the Weird Things…
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