Fireworks, parades and community mark America’s 250th in Chicago

Crowds fanned out across the Chicago area Saturday to celebrate the Fourth of July, marking 250 years of American independence with colorful parades, beach days and backyard barbecues.

For many revelers, the milestone added an emotional heft to Saturday’s festivities. Navy Pier planned its “largest and longest” fireworks display in history over Chicago’s skyline, organizers said. Despite forecasted afternoon rain and thunderstorms, dozens of fireworks shows were organized across the area.

At North Avenue Beach, a steady stream of beachgoers packed the sand, many with coolers and strollers in tow. Chicagoland is coming off an extreme heat warning, but the holiday still brought sweltering temperatures to the area.

Matt Watkins and Katherine Sinnett were surprised it wasn’t more crowded. The Lakeview East couple planned to attend the Chicago Cubs game later that evening.

“For the Fourth of July, I thought it would be busier,” Sinnett said.

America’s semiquincentennial caps 250 years of the promise and pursuit of a more perfect union. A journey of both extraordinary achievements and unfinished ideals, of freedom proclaimed, contested and unrealized.

And where better to celebrate than Chicago, whose dynamism and divisions so closely mirror the American story.

In 1776, the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, drawing up a radical vision of nationhood. Chicago has a different origin: The city’s first nonnative settler was Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, a Black immigrant from Haiti. Yet slavery would not be abolished until 1865, and the Voting Rights Act would not be signed for nearly two centuries. That is the tangled arc of America.

Through it all, the enduring spirit of independence — a dream of what could be — has coursed through generations.

Outside the newly-opened Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park, several civic-themed activities were planned as part of “The People’s Fourth” celebration across the campus, including self-guided tours, live music and face painting. Many who attended brought with them conflicted emotions about the holiday and the nation as a whole.

“I’m happy to celebrate this part of America,” Michelle Windbush said, looking out onto the main plaza as people grooved to “Party in the USA.” “It’s a 250 year anniversary, a piece of the history. So it was important to me to get here today.”

Windbush, 53, had come prepared for the heat with a hand fan and a can of Pepsi. She’d traveled from Ohio with her husband, daughter and mother-in-law to celebrate the holiday in Chicago. They had already waited in the line that stretched across the main plaza to take a picture with the bronze statue of Barack and Michelle Obama. The family had watched the movie about the center’s construction and visited the vegetable garden.

On the center’s Great Lawn, Sara and Brett Whittleton walked their Wheaten Terriers, Pixie and Angus, pausing to take in the tower just behind them. The couple had driven from their home in La Grange with a lunch cooler and water for the dogs.

Sara Whittleton, 58, said they were ready to “celebrate what the Obamas represent for our country and our democracy — intelligence, wisdom, compassion, grace, style, civility.”

Brett Whittleton, 63, interjected: “Did you remember compassion?”

Sisters Kayla and Serenity Chambers had made a beeline for the center’s museum on their arrival from Plainfield with their family and said it “was like going back in time” to the years of the Obama administration, when they’d been growing up.

Serenity Chambers, 27, said the experience “was kind of like a mourning — we had more pride in who our president was.”

But, she continued, “I still have hope.”

Asked what gave her that hope, she said: “Being Black.”

Kayla Chambers, 29, added that the presidential center’s museum highlighted organizing and activism efforts “happening at the community level — those are still happening.”

For her, that inspired hope, too.

At 2:30, the rock-n-roll street marching band Mucca Pazza lined up, adjusted the hats and knee socks many of them wore with their mismatched uniforms, and marched out to the main plaza.

With two sousaphones, an electric guitar and a litany of oversized pompoms among the more traditional marching band brass and drums, they performed a set punctuated with shouts, occasional drops to the pavement and chorus line kicks.

Monica Chiorean, 65, danced to the band with two of her grandsons, who had been given pompoms to hold and alternated between waving them around and putting them on their heads.

Chiorean said they’d been to the museum and walked around, “and here we are, dancing.”

She wanted her grandsons “to see people coming together, from small to big.”

“To be together, I think it is a great thing,” she said. “We are free. We are all the same.”

Back on the great lawn, away from the performances, Gabe and Sarah Heller sat on a bench and consulted a songbook titled “Songs of Hope and Courage.” They were about to play the folk hymn “How Can I Keep from Singing?”

The pair had taken a spur-of-the-moment trip to Chicago from Minneapolis, where they live, in search of what Gabe Heller described as “something positive to do.” They’d been ambivalent about the milestone holiday, particularly after witnessing “Operation Metro Surge,” the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration raids that led to the killings of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal agents.

“It does not make you feel like a free person, to not be able to go to the grocery store or your friends’ house without getting boxed in by masked men,” Sarah Heller said. She held her baritone ukulele — a larger, differently tuned version of a regular ukulele — on her lap. “The only thing we can do is not lay down.”

And the 45-year-old said she had been gratified to find a “sincerely patriotic” celebration in Jackson Park.

“It underscored for me the way that America is a place people have come for a very long time because they thought if they worked hard, they could make it,” she said.

Gabe Heller, 50, picked out “Saint Ann’s Reel” on the mandolin as his wife spoke.

“There are good things America has done and it’s nice to be with people who wanted to celebrate that while not ignoring the bad things,” he said.

In Little Village, the heart of Chicago’s Mexican community, the holiday drew more mixed emotions. The neighborhood was among those that experienced widescale raids during President Donald Trump’s Operation Midway Blitz in the fall.

Maria Reynoso and her family turned out to Birrieria Patiños Ocotlan restaurant on 26th Street, where a guitarist serenaded diners as they chowed down on birria — a traditional stew. For them, it was a family gathering unrelated to the Fourth of July.

“There’s nothing special to celebrate,” Reynoso said, noting the pervasive fear in the community. “We don’t have freedom, we don’t feel free. I don’t feel free, I don’t feel safe, so why (would I be) celebrating?”

Down the block, Gabriela Chavez and her husband Armando set up their merchandise stand outside a laundromat, where they have sold goods for two decades. Chavez said the vendor industry has struggled in recent years following the COVID-19 pandemic and intensified immigration enforcement.

Sales were slow Saturday morning, she said, as community members stayed away during the semiquincentennial celebrations due to rumors of massive raids.

“We don’t know where they’re going to come from, when they’re going to arrive,” Chavez said. “We know people with papers, people who don’t have papers, but we see on television how they mistreat people.”

Still, Chavez said she has found her own version of the American dream.

“We came to this country to find opportunities. I came as a young woman. I got married here and had my children,” Chavez said. “I give thanks to this country for all that.”