Saturday I went for a walk. I live in inner city Philadelphia, but I’m a block away from our huge Fairmount Park and an easy stroll to the Art Museum. I got rid of my car a couple years back, and I get around by bus and on foot just fine. I’m lucky.

As I was walking down to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, an imitation of the Champs-Élysées, I saw a small troupe of people in identical t shirts that read “Love Walk.” There were maybe forty of them. They came to a stop at the bottom of the Art Museum steps, known as the “Rocky Steps” by out of towners.

A bunch of marquees were set up on Eakins Oval a little further on, because of a massive bike ride happening at the same time. I got rid of my bike a good long while ago.

A trainer was leading a warmup routine from a stage, and a bunch of people in bike shoes were dutifully doing high kicks. 

When I first lived in this area in the 1970s, not much was happening on the weekends on the Parkway, not even on Saturdays. Pennsylvania basically shut down on Sundays, but Saturdays weren’t much better.

Then in 1973 the city hosted its first Parkway festival, Super Sunday. It was wild. There were carnival rides, performers, vendors, and snacks of every sort. It turned into a yearly thing for another twenty years or more.

Other festivals followed suit.

Now on weekends it’s rare the Parkway isn’t shut down for something. 

That’s great. I love it. For the most part. My husband hated it because it shut down traffic all over. I am of two minds because it also shuts down SEPTA, the local transportation authority. The detours are unpredictable, to say the least. I can still walk, though.

I was going to a festival that wasn’t on the Parkway, though, so I had to walk a long way, all the way to City Hall.

At first I thought my event was going to be sparse, but after I met up with friends and kept walking, I saw the crowds and heard that low-frequency crowd sound that travels, like a lion’s roar. 

Love walks and bike rides aside, and despite the crowds of tourists going to the Art Museum, quite a few people had turned out for the rally I was joining, the “No Kings” demonstration. There were something like a hundred thousand people there.

Someone I know from another protest was leading the chants. People were wearing t Rex suits and were dressed as Teletubbies. The signs were creative. Everyone was friendly. A lot of them were old people my age. I split off from my friends and found my kid. 

Eventually we headed back, but it took a while because the bus detours didn’t make any sense with half of the center city’s roads shut down. An elderly man told us he had been trying to get home for an hour and a half. My kid and I helped a lady with a walker get to a bus that would take her to her detoured bus.

Because a hundred thousand people is a lot, but it was a tiny percentage of the population, most of whom were just going about their lives and trying to catch a bus because they had a long way to go and couldn’t walk very well.

My kid told me later, “The woman I was waiting for the subway with this morning told me ‘I’m raced and paraded out. Everyone sit down.’”

God, I was glad I could go, though.