East Atlanta Village · Track 19 · middle

Madison Theatre: The Unsegregated Dark

The Madison Theatre, an abandoned Moorish-Revival cinema on Flat Shoals Avenue in East Atlanta Village. Built 1927, one of the only unsegregated theaters in Atlanta during Jim Crow. Closed 1968. Now a mattress warehouse. The bridge lyrics code a jab at the absentee landlord (owns ~1/3 of EAV, refuses historic status, says he'll rent it but never does).

Lyrics

[Intro]

[Verse 1]
Gargoyles still watch Flat Shoals.
Moorish stone in the late afternoon.
Six hundred seats sleeping in the dark.
A five-thousand dollar organ remembers a tune.
Marquee's been gone for forty years.
The bricks remember every name.
The bricks remember every name.

[Verse 2]
Nineteen twenty-seven, the lights came on.
The Buckaroo Kid on opening day.
Air conditioning for the Atlanta heat —
the South had nothing else like the way it played.
And here's the thing they don't carve in stone:
no rope down the aisle, no balcony color line,
every face in the same dark room.
Every face. Every face.

[Chorus]
Madison, Madison,
gargoyles in a Jim Crow town.
Madison, Madison,
the only door left open
when every other door was closed.

[Verse 3]
Sixty-eight, the lights went out.
Sixty-nine, the hippies tried again.
East Atlanta Cinema flickered for a year,
then the neighborhood let go and the screen went dim.
Eighty-seven, mattresses moved in.
Foam and springs where the silver used to spin.

[Bridge]
And the man who holds the deed —
a third of the village rests in his hand.
Says he's going to rent it.
Says he's going to rent it.
Doesn't fix it. Doesn't list it.
Doesn't let her dance.

[Chorus]
Madison, Madison,
gargoyles in a Jim Crow town.
Madison, Madison,
your finest hour was the dark you let them share.

[Outro]
Five offers walked away.
The gargoyles wait.
The gargoyles wait.
Flat Shoals keeps rolling past.