Atlantic Station: Mall on a Steel Mill

Lyrics

Got the bag in my hand.
Plastic handles cutting in just a little.
Walked across the big bridge from 17th Street.
Feels like they built a whole new city on a tabletop.
Everything is from 2005.
There’s a Target, there’s a Dillard’s, there’s a Publix underground.
There’s that big blue box from Sweden that showed up in 2007.
Smells like particleboard and meatballs.
I bought a lamp. It’s called a Forsa.
Got the receipt folded in my back pocket.
Saw a family pushing a stroller with twins.
They’re pointing at the fountain.
They don’t feel the ghosts.
But this was the Atlantic Steel Company.
One hundred and thirty-eight acres of fire and slag.
Jim Jacoby came and scraped the rust off the dirt.
Poured a new foundation over the old one.
And now my heaviest burden...
...is this shopping bag.
From 1901 to 1998, this ground shook.
It smelled like hot metal and coal smoke.
Diesel exhaust from the heavy machines.
Now it smells like movie popcorn and whatever they’re spraying at Bath & Body Works.
The shift whistle is a car alarm.
The sweat is from a spin class at the LA Fitness.
The only furnace is the pizza oven at California Pizza Kitchen.
Yeah, this was the Atlantic Steel Company.
One hundred and thirty-eight acres of fire and slag.
Jim Jacoby came and scraped the rust off the dirt.
Poured a new foundation over the old one.
And now my heaviest burden...
...is this shopping bag.
They called it a brownfield.
Had to dig up the poison soil before they could put down the clean sod for the central park.
Over by the Regal Cinema, there’s a slab of old concrete they left on purpose.
A little grey tombstone from the mill.
I put my hand on it.
It’s not warm. It's not cold.
It’s just… there.
Remembering for us.
The sun’s going down behind the IKEA.
My Forsa lamp is safe in its flat-pack box.
I wonder who worked the last shift in 1998.
I wonder what they carried home.
Probably wasn't a lamp.