Underground Atlanta: Five Layers

Lyrics

You go down.
Down from the sun on Pryor Street.
The air gets cool, fifteen degrees cooler.
Smells like a cellar.
Smells like wet brick and time.
This is the city's basement.

Before the rise, this was the floor.
This was the noise.
Granite cobblestones slick with rain and horse trouble.
A merchant sweeps his stoop, watches a drayman tie his mule to a cast-iron post.
He doesn't know he's living in a basement.
Not yet.
He thinks this is the ground floor of the world.
1866.

But the trains kept coming.
And the mud got deep.
So the city fathers, the men with names in books, made a decision.
A clean slate.
Henry L. Collier drew the plans around 1899.
We will rise, they said.
We will build a second floor on Atlanta and call it the street.

They brought the brick.
They brought the mortar.
The ledgers don't name the men with broken hands who laid the arches, tunnel by tunnel.
Sealing the storefronts of 1870.
Your front door is now a basement window.
Your street is now a ceiling.
Ghost signs on the walls, advertising soap to the darkness.

Because the trains kept coming.
And the mud got deep.
So the city fathers, the men with names in books, made a decision.
A clean slate.
Henry L. Collier drew the plans around 1899.
We will rise, they said.
We will build a second floor on Atlanta and call it the street.

Then in 1968, they remembered the basement.
Found the key.
Turned on the lights and called it a party.
Sold tickets to the tomb.
Dressed up the history in gaslights and player pianos.
A floor show in the foundation.
A good story, if you don't think about the weight of what's above.

Now it's quiet again.
The party's over.
Just the drip from a seam in the viaduct.
The rumble of the next layer.
And somewhere in the dark, a hitching post waits for a horse that turned to dust a century ago.