Tucker has spent a year celebrating the fact that it exists at all. On October 17, 2026, that year-long party ends with a festival that leans into the joke the city has been telling about itself: a band best known for "We Built This City" will close out the tenth-anniversary celebration of a city that, a decade ago, was not a city.
The Tucker Ten-Tober Festival runs from 3 to 10 p.m. on the Tucker Town Green at 4226 Railroad Avenue, with the evening portion spilling onto Main Street. Admission is free. Lawn chairs are welcome on both the green and Main Street, though outside alcohol and glass containers are not. Main Street will be closed to traffic from 6 a.m. to midnight.
The afternoon is a family-friendly take on Oktoberfest: live music, traditional games, activities, and a curated selection of beer from six local breweries. At 3:30 p.m., a giant screen on the Town Green will carry the Georgia-Auburn football game, turning the green into a shared living room for one of the SEC's older grudges. Then in the evening, the crowd moves to Main Street for Starship featuring Mickey Thomas.
That booking is not random. The city's own announcement makes the connection explicit: "Starship's iconic song 'We Built This City' offers a fitting and fun theme for Tucker's 10th anniversary. Over the past decade, Tucker has literally built a city: one shaped by its residents, businesses, neighborhoods and community organizations."
It is a genuinely apt pairing, and not only for the pun. Mickey Thomas, the band's lead singer and last remaining original member, was born in Cairo, Georgia, in 1949 and was inspired to pursue music after traveling to Atlanta as a teenager in 1965 to see the Beatles perform. Before fronting Jefferson Starship and then Starship, he sang lead on Elvin Bishop's "Fooled Around and Fell in Love." Starship itself grew out of Jefferson Airplane by way of Jefferson Starship, and "We Built This City" became the band's defining hit, a No. 1 single that has since been both beloved and, in some quarters, famously maligned. It is the kind of song a city picks when it wants a crowd of several thousand people to sing the same words at the same time.
The milestone being marked is real and, by Georgia standards, recent. Tucker existed for well over a century as one of the state's largest unincorporated communities, a DeKalb County census-designated place with a downtown, a railroad, and a strong local identity but no municipal government of its own. For the next 120-plus years, Tucker's sense of itself ran through its schools, churches, and small businesses rather than through a city hall.
That changed in November 2015, when Tucker voters approved cityhood with nearly 74 percent of the vote. The referendum was widely understood as a reaction to a parallel proposal for the neighboring city of LaVista Hills, which failed on the same ballot. Tucker's win and LaVista Hills' loss were a split decision that reshaped the map of DeKalb County. Tucker incorporated in 2016 and elected its first mayor and six council members that March; Frank Auman, a local business owner, became the inaugural mayor. The city now covers more than 22 square miles and has a population of over 38,000.
The Town Green where the festival opens is itself a product of that decade. In 2017, a team from the Urban Land Institute produced a parking study for the Tucker-Northlake CID, and tucked inside it was a concept for a small amphitheater on a vacant Railroad Avenue lot that had been rented out for RV storage for decades. The idea stuck with property owner Chip Cofer and CID leadership. In September 2021, the city approved an agreement to purchase the land, and the green was designed not as a traditional park but as an extension of the Main Street experience — a place for concerts, for the farmers market, for the community to gather. Five years of discussions with commercial property owners and planners preceded the purchase. The festival's headline set is, in a sense, the green doing exactly what it was bought to do.
Mayor Anne Lerner framed the finale as a thank-you. "Reaching our tenth year of incorporation is a profound milestone for our community," she said in the city's announcement. "This finale is our way of saying thank you to the residents, businesses and community partners who have helped shape the city over the last decade. We wanted to create a celebration where everyone could find something to enjoy while celebrating 10 years of Tucker."
The city has said the complete entertainment lineup for the day will be shared on its website and social media. What is already set is the shape of the thing: an afternoon of beer and games and a football game on a screen, an evening of arena rock on a closed Main Street, and a town that spent its first ten years as a municipality figuring out what it wanted to be — then throwing itself a party with a band whose biggest song is about building something from nothing.