Piedmont Park opens up in front of you, 189 acres of lawns, lakes, and wooded paths that make it Atlanta's largest green space within the city proper and the backyard of Midtown. The land was the site of the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition, a World's Fair-style event designed to announce the New South's economic ambitions to the world. Booker T. Washington delivered his famous Atlanta Compromise address at the exposition, articulating a vision of racial accommodation that W.E.B. Du Bois would later call the most dangerous speech in African-American history — not because it was wrong in every particular but because it gave cover to the forces that were constructing Jim Crow.
The park was formally established in 1904 and expanded over the following decades. It has hosted the Atlanta Pride Festival, the Peachtree Road Race finish line, and countless concerts and farmers markets that make it the social engine of Midtown. On a weekend morning the park is Atlanta in its most relaxed and democratic mode — runners and dog walkers and families and cyclists mixing on the same paths, with the Midtown skyline rising above the trees to the south.
This is the city breathing.