Odes to Toco Hills · Track 22 · middle
A Walking Community in a Driving City
Per feedback_city_album_formula — cultural pillars. Toco Hills' deliberate civic identity as a WALKING community inside metropolitan Atlanta — the eruv, the shul-walk, the shopping-center scale that lets families exist without cars on Sabbath, the way the neighborhood inverts the suburban car-default. Rudy Champ swings into the celebration.
Lyrics
[Intro] Yeah. They call this a driving town. They're not wrong. But they're not looking close enough. [Verse 1] Six lanes of asphalt gospel on Ponce de Leon. The river of red taillights on the Connector, every night at six. They built this place for the internal combustion engine. A city of drive-thrus and parking decks. But here... Here, on this little rise off LaVista, they drew up a different map in 1956. A blueprint for the shoe leather soul. [Chorus] This is a walking community in a driving city. A sabbath exception to the rule of the road. We draw the line, eighteen feet off the ground, and inside it, the sound of the engine dies down. Just footsteps on the concrete, a different kind of sound. [Verse 2] Friday evening, the sun goes soft behind the pines. No keys in the ignition. The whole neighborhood exhales. Families in their good clothes on the sidewalk, headed for the brick house of Beth Jacob, or the quiet door of Anshe S'fard, down the street since 1955. You can smell the challah cooling on the kitchen counters. You can hear a conversation from two doors down. This isn't an accident. This is a design. [Chorus] This is a walking community in a driving city. A sabbath exception to the rule of the road. We draw the line, eighteen feet off the ground, and inside it, the sound of the engine dies down. Just footsteps on the concrete, a different kind of sound. [Bridge] You want to know the secret? It's a piece of fishing line. Twenty-pound test monofilament, that's the whole trick. Strung between the Georgia Power poles and some PVC pipe. Checked by a volunteer in a minivan, every Thursday night. Making a room out of a zip code. Making a home you can carry things in. A simple piece of string that holds a whole world together. Changes the way the air feels. [Outro] So let 'em have their highways. Let 'em have their traffic jams. Here, we measure distance in footsteps. From your front door to the kosher butcher. From the porch light to the shul. A walking community. Right in the middle of a driving town. Yeah.