Odes to Downtown Atlanta · Track 22 · middle

A Downtown Reimagined

Per feedback_city_album_formula — cultural pillars. Downtown's deliberate civic re-imagination over the last 30 years: the Olympic transformation, the CNN era, the Mercedes-Benz Stadium era, the GSU campus expansion, the South Downtown Newport revitalization. The way Atlanta keeps rebuilding its own center. Rudy Champ swings into the celebration.

Lyrics

Yeah. You hear that sound?
That's the sound of Tuesday morning.
That's the sound of us.
Always building something.

Remember 1996? Before the park?
Just rust and brick dust and old rail spurs going nowhere.
We cleared the table.
Wiped it clean.
Told the whole world to pull up a chair.
July 19, that night was thick.
Smelled of fresh-cut sod and idling bus diesel.
They say a crew left a single MARTA spike in the dirt under the Fountain of Rings.
Just one.
An anchor for the next idea.
Because there is always a next idea.

This town don't sit still.
It's a blueprint on a cocktail napkin, a crane against the clouds.
We tear the old map up just to draw it again, twice as loud.
A downtown reimagined, every single time.
This ain't history, baby.
This is a live feed.

Ted Turner looked out from One CNN Center in 1987 and said, "The world is coming right here."
Put the newsroom right at the heart of it.
Then Georgia State looked at the old office blocks and said, "We'll take that one. And that one, too."
Fifty thousand students walking where the file clerks used to walk.
Turned a nine-to-five ghost town into a twenty-four-hour pulse.
Yeah, we'll take that.

August 26, 2017.
Stood right there.
Heard the pinwheel roof click open like a giant camera shutter.
Smelled the new concrete curing in the sun.
Down in South Downtown, Newport's drawing up the plans for what comes next.
We don't do museums to ourselves.
We do momentum.

So keep your landmarks.
Keep your precious stones.
We build with steel and glass and impossible deadlines.
And we are never, ever done.