Odes to Downtown Atlanta · Track 15 · middle

Georgia State: A Campus in the CBD

Georgia State University — the urban campus stitched into downtown, GSU students walking to class through the historic CBD, the converted office-buildings-turned-dorms, the way a 50,000-student commuter school became an anchor tenant of downtown's 21st-c rebirth. Sisukiro on the campus quad.

Lyrics

[Intro]
August 23, 2017.
The asphalt on Decatur Street breathing heat back at the sky.
Cicadas in Hurt Park, a sound so thick it could stop a lecture.
And you... just a whisper then, woven into the concrete.

[Verse 1]
You weren't born a campus with a gate and a quad.
You were an idea in 1913.
An evening school for the people who worked all day.
George Manns Sparks saw you in the tired faces after a shift.
No ivy walls for you.
Just the city grid, the streetlights your lamp.

[Chorus]
You take the bankers' towers and you make them your own.
At 25 Park Place, where they counted money, now they study poems.
You are a campus stitched from street corners and glass.
Your hallways are the sidewalks, your quad is the city's grass.
And your heart just beats to the rhythm of the train below.

[Verse 2]
I walk past Dahlberg Hall, the old Municipal Auditorium.
Remember when the city gave you the keys in 1974?
And the Rialto Theatre, a ghost from 1998.
They say the old projection booth is still up there, empty.
A dark eye watching the student plays from above the balcony.

[Chorus]
You take the bankers' towers and you make them your own.
At 25 Park Place, where they counted money, now they study poems.
You are a campus stitched from street corners and glass.
Your hallways are the sidewalks, your quad is the city's grass.
And your heart just beats to the rhythm of the train below.

[Bridge]
William M. Suttles signed the paper in 1969.
And you became what you were always meant to be.
A university.
Now fifty-thousand souls walk your concrete paths.
Fifty thousand futures between Kell Hall and the Library.
And the names not in the archives...
The crews who arrive at 4 a.m.
To polish the marble floors of old banks for an 8 a.m. class.
Their stories are written in the clean glass and the quiet hum of the lights coming on.

[Outro]
The coffee truck on Decatur is closing up now.
The cicadas are finally quiet.
I can hear the MARTA chime from the Five Points station.
You are not a place.
You are the current that runs through these downtown streets.
You are the pulse.