From Decline to Design: The Battle for Inman Park

Lyrics

The nineteen-fifties bled into the sixties.
And the air on Euclid Avenue grew heavy.
Heavy with the smell of damp plaster, and time running out.

The grand Victorians held their breath.
Gables sagged, turrets wept black streaks of rain.
Joel Hurt's garden suburb, carved up for room and board.
A dozen doorbells on a single peeling frame.
The bankers called it blight.
The city called it gone.
A chapter to be closed, a page to turn upon.

Then came the maps, the surveyor's bright orange flags.
A line drawn straight through the heart of the houses.
I-485. A concrete river, six lanes wide.
A promise of progress that would swallow everything inside.
They said it was the future.
A clean, efficient scar.
To erase the rot, no matter what we were.

But some heard a different sound than the wrecking ball's decree.
The scrape of steel on wood, the price of being free.
The hammer's patient answer to the planner's careless pen.
This was sweat equity. We're building it again.
From decline to design, with calloused hand and nerve.
This is the history we choose to preserve.

Robert and Ruth Griggs, nineteen sixty-nine.
A few thousand dollars for a mansion on the line.
They saw the solid bones beneath the water-damaged skin.
And in a dimly lit living room, let the fight begin.
The Restoration Committee, fueled by coffee and by doubt.
Just a handful of believers, trying to shout the asphalt out.

And they heard a different sound than the wrecking ball's decree.
The scrape of steel on wood, the price of being free.
The hammer's patient answer to the planner's careless pen.
This was sweat equity. We're building it again.
From decline to design, with calloused hand and nerve.
This is the history we choose to preserve.

We didn't just fight the highway.
We fought the slow decay.
We tore out the rotten floorboards to let in the light of day.
Every nail a protest. Every windowpane a vow.
The future wasn't on a map. The future was right now.
On our knees, on the ladders, in the dust of a hundred years.

And in '72, a simple potluck on the grass.
The first small festival, to show the threat had passed.
Not with a roar of engines, but the sound of a neighbor's laugh.
The work is never over.
The foundation holds.
The story is told.