We set a cap of 10,000 participants in 1997 and came pretty close to reaching it! We offered illumiNITE t-shirts for the first time in 1997. We hosted our pre-event volunteer party at Slugger's Sports Bar. We moved our volunteer "warehouse work nights" from the back of a paint store on Chicago's Northwest Side (across from WXRT) to the flower-filled manufacturing "campus" of A. Finkl & Sons Co., located in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood. Several hundred people helped us assemble 10,000 rider goody bags and 10,000 breakfast bags there during seven work sessions.