Murphy Avenue: The Brewery Strip

Lyrics

Alright.
Murphy Avenue.
Sun's high, beer's cold.
Let's go.

Used to be just a long, flat shot of asphalt.
Nothing to see here, man.
Just brick walls with no windows, painted-over signs.
Trucks backing up, beeping in the pre-dawn dark.
Now the big roll-up doors are wide open to the sky.
You smell that? That's spent grain and hops on hot pavement.
Monday Night Garage holding court on the left.
Wild Heaven pouring godsblood on the right.
The whole street is the new front porch.

This is the new river, this is the main line.
This is the artery, beating in time.
Murphy Avenue, Saturday afternoon.
From warehouse quiet to a steady human roar.
Everybody walking, glass in hand, from door to door.
Got my flight, got my spot.
Yeah, this is the brewery strip.
This is what we've got.

See the bikes all lined up shiny in the docks?
Blue and white, fresh off the Westside BeltLine path.
Folks walking down from Adair Park, from West End, from Pittsburgh.
Used to be a back road, a service road, a dead end.
Now it's the damn main event.
ASW pouring that Fiddler whiskey.
Boggs Social got a band rattling the windows.
A whole new map drawn right here in the cinders.
This is the new downtown for a Saturday.

This is the new river, this is the main line.
This is the artery, beating in time.
Murphy Avenue, Saturday afternoon.
From warehouse quiet to a steady human roar.
Everybody walking, glass in hand, from door to door.
Got my flight, got my spot.
Yeah, this is the brewery strip.
This is what we've got.

Sometimes you look past the string lights, at the old brick.
The faded paint from a company name you can't quite read.
Wonder whose hands laid these walls, what they hauled out of here.
What they made here before 2018 rolled in.
Before the stainless steel tanks and the Edison bulbs.
You can still feel the ghost of it.
A different kind of work. A different kind of heavy.
A different kind of sweat baked into the stone.

But the sun's still high.
And this West End IPA is cold.
Another round.
Another story getting told.
Right here. Right now.
Murphy Avenue.
Yeah.