On July 4th, thousands gather in D.C. to celebrate a nearly normal Independence Day

On Saturday, organizers in bright yellow vests made their final preparations to secure entrances to the Mall. Two giggling kids, dressed in matching red, white and blue muscle shirts, chased each other around the Washington Monument as slushies sloshed in their waving hands. More than a hundred tourists snacked on tacos, cheesesteaks and gyros from nearby food trucks as they swayed to a man singing “Stand by Me.”

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One vendor selling cold drinks said it was the most people he’d seen there in a long time.

“We’re back,” he declared, anticipating a lucrative July 4 after the pandemic wrecked his sales a year earlier.

To city leaders’ relief, law enforcement has issued no warnings that far-right extremists or anti-fascist activists intend to disrupt the day’s festivities.

And with the pandemic finally easing, the summer sun will beat down Sunday on mostly maskless faces until darkness falls, the fireworks begin and rockets glare red over citizens no longer required to stand six feet apart.

At the National Archives, actors portraying George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin prepared to educate and entertain, and at Mount Vernon, the home of America’s first president, immigrants readied to become naturalized U.S. citizens. Back, too, are D.C. parades along Barracks Row on Capitol Hill and in the Palisades in Northwest Washington, which will include an in-person pie-eating contest after last year’s considerably less messy virtual showdown.

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The country’s 245th birthday follows a pair that were like none other in modern U.S. history, and in its capital, the wait for a dose of ordinary patriotic revelry has felt particularly long.

In 2019, President Donald Trump hijacked the holiday, modeling his “Salute to America” after a Bastille Day celebration. In a ceremony that loosely resembled those thrown by authoritarian regimes, Coast Guard helicopters, an Air Force B-2 stealth bomber and Navy Blue Angels flew overhead. A pair of 25-ton Bradley Fighting Vehicles were parked inside a chain-link enclosure accessible only to people with VIP tickets issued by the White House or Republican Party. Under storm clouds, and in front of Abraham Lincoln’s marble statue, Trump gave a speech that included both a lofty reference to the country’s “magnificent destiny” and an inexplicable reference to Revolutionary War-era “airports” that did not exist.

The next year’s celebration, in 2020, proved no less unusual. Amid a still-raging pandemic, and just weeks after violent protests over George Floyd’s death, the number of visitors to D.C. plummeted, with just one-tenth of the number of people riding in on Metro compared with the year before. At Black Lives Matter Plaza, flags were burned and trampled. Elsewhere, Trump supporters scuffled with protesters, ripping signs away from each other before dozens of police officers were forced to separate the two groups.

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The president fanned those divisions in a speech from the White House’s South Lawn. “We are now in the process of defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters,” Trump said, promising to “safeguard our values, traditions, customs and beliefs.”

Now, almost exactly six months after Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop Congress from certifying his electoral defeat, his successor, President Biden, hopes to return July Fourth to its bipartisan traditions, hosting 1,000 military personnel and essential workers at the “America’s Back Together” White House celebration.

Much of the Mall, and beyond, has begun to look just the way it did pre-pandemic, pre-protests, pre-insurrection. The plywood on downtown buildings has disappeared, and the battalions of sweaty, disinterested high-schoolers have returned. The melodic, sometimes mind-numbing soundtrack of Constitution Avenue — those ice cream truck chimes — is back, as are the half-full Big Bus Tours that rumble by them. The Smithsonian museums have reopened, and in Lafayette Square, across from the White House, Segway tours pass by office workers eating their lunches on park benches.

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But even as office workers and tourists return, D.C. won’t be entirely what it was before, perhaps ever. Physical reminders of the city’s long period of chaos persist.

In Lafayette Square, a public bathroom that last summer’s protesters set ablaze has yet to be repaired. With its walls charred, the building is enclosed behind chain-link fence, like a museum piece on display for curious, or confused, passersby.

Across the road are the now iconic giant yellow letters declaring “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” a permanent nod to what thousands of activists have marched for on the city’s streets.

And less than two miles away, just beyond the Peace Monument, black metal fencing still guards the Capitol. “AREA CLOSED,” the red-lettered signs read, the result of an assault on American democracy that, among other things, has forced the annual Capitol Fourth concert to be prerecorded and aired on television.