Odes to Toco Hills · Track 1 · opener

Toco Hills: A Shopping-Center Suburb

Opener — Toco Hills as one of the first post-WWII shopping-center suburbs of Atlanta, built around the 1956 Toco Hill Shopping Center on LaVista Road, the way the strip mall became the civic anchor that shaped the residential streets behind. Sisukiro hands the neighborhood its center.

Lyrics

[Intro]
I saw you when you were just a line in a surveyor's transit.
Just a pencil mark on a plat map from 1954.
Just red clay waiting for the blade.

[Verse 1]
First, the wooden stakes went in.
A grid for streets not yet named.
Sheridan Road, a straight shot through the pines.
LaVista, the view they promised was coming.
They scraped the farmland flat for you.
For the returning GIs and the small brick ranches they hadn't built yet.
They needed a place to put the heart.
Before the first foundation was poured for a house,
they poured you.

[Chorus]
And in July of 1956, you opened your doors.
Toco Hill Shopping Center, a heart made of asphalt and glass.
You weren't an afterthought, you were the anchor.
The first thing here.
The sun around which the split-levels would orbit.
The reason for the sidewalks, the driveways, the front yards.
You gave this place its center.

[Verse 2]
Ninety-two degrees on opening day.
The smell of fresh lumber from the hardware store.
The smell of hot tar from the parking lot.
And the parking spaces, a perfect diagonal.
Sized just right for a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air.
Not a single tree for shade.
Just the wide-open promise of everything you need
in one place.

[Chorus]
And in July of 1956, you opened your doors.
Toco Hill Shopping Center, a heart made of asphalt and glass.
You weren't an afterthought, you were the anchor.
The first thing here.
The sun around which the split-levels would orbit.
The reason for the sidewalks, the driveways, the front yards.
You gave this place its center.

[Bridge]
And then the houses came.
They rose up in the streets behind you.
Their picture windows faced your parking lot.
Their screen doors opened toward your grocery aisles.
They were built to walk to you.
A new kind of living.
A suburb built around the shopping.
A community designed around the convenience of a single, paved acre.

[Outro]
The first car pulls in.
The second.
The sound of new tires on new asphalt.
This is the sound of a beginning.
This is the sound of a neighborhood being handed its core.