1996: The Centennial Olympic Park

Lyrics

I remember the day you were born.
July 19, 1996.
Ninety-two degrees.
And the air tasted like chlorine and new grass.

Before you, just a dozen acres of forgetting.
Warehouses sleeping off the railroad's dream.
Between 1992 and 1995, they peeled it all back.
The pavement, the dust.
Found a privy shaft from the old saloon district.
Glass bottles waiting under the ground that would hold your basin.
A city's secret thirst.
They cleared it all for you.

And then the hiss.
Two hundred and fifty-one jets of water reaching for the humid air.
Fountain of Rings, you woke up all at once.
A new heart for a city holding its breath.
The whole world was coming, and you were the welcome mat.
You were the cool promise on a hot afternoon.

They laid the Quilt of Quilts, a blanket of names.
They set thirty thousand pavers at your feet.
Billy Payne’s vision, Maynard Jackson’s will.
A downtown carved out, reimagined, a public space where there was only commerce and decay.
And now we walk on the rings, on the names of donors.
We read the city's ambition written in brick.
Every step a reminder of the price of the party.

And the hiss came again.
Two hundred and fifty-one jets of water climbing the summer sky.
Fountain of Rings, you woke up all at once.
A new heart for a city holding its breath.
The whole world was coming, and you were the welcome mat.
You were the cool promise on a hot afternoon.

And now...
The children who weren't born yet, they run through your spray.
They don't know the smell of diesel from the MARTA construction.
They don't know the arguments or the displacement.
They just know the water.
They just know the joy of a sudden geyser on a summer day.
You hold that memory for them. You hold the before and the after.

You are still here.
The city changed around you again.
But you are the anchor.
The constant, cool pulse.
The hiss of the water.
The five rings.
Still breathing.