Ghost Signs & Fading Walls: Echoes of What Was

Lyrics

There’s a wall on Edgewood Avenue.
You pass it every day.
The brick is bleeding through the white.
Something to do with… Coca-Cola. Or maybe bread.
The sun hits it just right around four.
You can almost make out the letters.
A capital ‘G’. An ‘O’.
Maybe "Goods".
Maybe "Groceries".
Hand-painted, slow.
A promise made in lead and oil, a century ago.
Before the big-box stores arrived,
Before the concrete flow.
This was the place you came for milk.
The place everybody knows.
And the ghost signs preach a silent sermon.
Fading ink on a crumbling page.
Whispering the names of the forgotten.
Just texture now, for a brand new age.
An echo that the new noise smothers.
Yeah, the ghost signs watch us.
Down the street, the bungalows sag.
The porches remember feet that are gone.
The families who heard the streetcars die.
Who watched the quiet drawn
across their storefronts, like a sheet.
Nineteen fifty-something. The silence deep.
Their kids moved out, the rents got cheap.
And the walls just held the secrets they keep.
And the ghost signs preach a silent sermon.
Fading ink on a crumbling page.
Whispering the names of the forgotten.
Just texture now, for a brand new age.
An echo that the new noise smothers.
Yeah, the ghost signs watch us.
Did the painter know, standing on his ladder?
That his careful work would outlive the store?
Outlive the owner, and all that mattered?
A palimpsest on the wall of before.
From an independent town in 1909,
To this… this asset. This desirable line.
The lights from the Target parking lot shine
on the ghost of a world that was never mine.
Never mine.
Just a faded sign.
Bleeding through.
Bleeding through.