Fairlie-Poplar: The Historic CBD

Lyrics

The map calls this Fairlie-Poplar.
A name on a grid.
But the air here is thicker.
Holds the dust of another city.
A fossil layer under the glass.

Here. Stop here. This is 57 Forsyth Street.
The Healey Building. 1913.
Seventeen stories of glazed terra-cotta.
William T. Healey signed the deed.
His name is on the plaque.
But the hands that carved these lions on the cornice...
Italian names, the foreman thought.
Lost now. Not on the payroll ledger.
Just the weight of the stone.

And across at Peachtree and Luckie, the English-American Building.
You call it the Flatiron. 1897.
A ship's prow sailing into the intersection.
Eleven stories on a wedge of land
that narrows to nine feet at the tip.
They fit a staircase behind the elevator shaft.
A single file line to the sky.
Imagine climbing that in the heat of 1915.

This is the city's memory in limestone and brick.
The geologic stratum before the mirrored glass.
You read the names on the cornerstones: Candler, Healey.
I read the gaps in the Sanborn map.
The unrecorded names.
The pressure that turned labor into form.
This is the downtown under the downtown.

Walk to 127 Peachtree.
The Candler Building. 1906.
Asa Griggs Candler's monument to himself.
Marble lobby, cool to the touch even in August.
The elevator directory from 1910 lists a name:
"Miss L."
That's all. First initial.
She ran the cage up and down, watching the floors tick by.
Watching the city rise from her operator's stool.

Close your eyes. It's July, 1915. Ninety-two degrees.
The open windows on the sixth floor of the Healey let in the clatter of typewriters.
The smell of coal smoke from the Terminal, mixing with bread from a bakery on Poplar.
And in the contractor's expense book for the new addition...
A single line item.
"Colored help, $42."
Forty-two dollars for the men who mixed the mortar.
Their names, a number.

Forsyth. Walton. Poplar. Fairlie.
The streets hold the shape of it.
The fossil layer.
Still here.
If you know how to look.
If you know how to read the stone.