Y’all know ATL’s just gonna ATL sometimes. Here are a few of our favorite things that happened here this year—and couldn’t have happened anywhere else.
André 3000 serenaded a fresh bundle of Grady babies
Most newborns get to listen to only their parent cooing—but not in Atlanta. In June, the one and only André 3000 popped into Grady Hospital with his flute, treating the littlest ATLiens (and their families) to a private concert. The eternally surprising artist played a string of pop-up performances around town this year at such venues as a parking lot off Metropolitan Parkway.
Kevin the singing rollerblader became a sponsored athlete
In a masterstroke of local marketing, the Atlanta-based restaurant group Rreal Tacos invited Beltline sensation Kevin Randolph—the one-man singing-and-skating phenom who’s become synonymous with joyful sunny days on the trail—to become an official brand ambassador, to the tune of $100,000 per year. “I love everyone, that’s why I sing,” Randolph said in a tearful video Rreal Tacos posted announcing the surprise offer. “Gracias a todos.”
Home Grown owners buy their building
Since 2015, Kevin Clark and Lisa Spooner have served hearty, soul-filling breakfast and lunch fare inside Home Grown’s humble wood-paneled walls on Memorial Drive. Once a bleak strip of abandoned factories and empty lots, Memorial has gentrified over the years, filling in with gleaming new apartment buildings and chic restaurants. But Home Grown stayed much the same, with off-duty police officers devouring comfy chicken biscuits elbow to elbow with tattooed hipsters. With their purchase of the low-slung white building, Clark and Spooner have promised to keep it just as it is, an emblem of yesteryear Atlanta beloved by old-timers and newcomers alike.
CDC employees clap-out resigning officials
It has been a difficult year for the folks at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Aggressive federal downsizing has cost over 4,000 public health workers their jobs, funding cuts have hobbled cancer research and foreign disease tracking, and this summer, a shooter fired hundreds of rounds into the CDC building, killing DeKalb police officer David Rose. But fired CDC employees and a supportive public have routinely showed up to support the beleaguered agency; in August, when three high-ranking officials resigned in protest, hundreds of people gathered outside the building in a “clap-out” thanking them for their work. The videos went viral online, reminding the world of the passion and dedication of Atlanta’s public health community.
Falling meteor . . . or spaceships in Bankhead?
On the afternoon of June 26, astonished Georgians watched a huge fireball of light streak through the sky over metro Atlanta. NASA quickly confirmed that it was a large bolide meteor plummeting through the atmosphere at 30,000 miles per hour—or was it? “Spaceships in Bankhead,” read many an internet comment, a reference to the song “Scotty” by the short-lived Atlanta hip-hop group D4L, which memorably begins with that line, drawled by member rapper Fabo. Perhaps life does imitate art after all.
This article appears in our December 2025 issue.
