King Plow Arts Center

Lyrics

[Intro]

[Verse 1]
Another Thursday night on West Marietta Street.
The air is thick with linseed oil, humidity, and a very dry Sauvignon Blanc.
They hung the abstracts where the foreman's office used to be.
Little red dots on the wall, next to the price.
Everyone is talking about the brushwork, about their place in the Hamptons.
No one mentions the gouges in the floorboards from a century of steel carts.
No one but me.

[Verse 2]
Thomas E. King, his name is on the cornerstone, 1884.
He didn't build a place for contemplation.
He built a foundry to forge plowshares.
Iron teeth for the red Georgia clay.
This room, this very spot, held the steam hammer.
A two-ton weight that fell and fell, shaking the teeth in your head a block away.
Forging tools to break the land.

[Chorus]
And here it is.
The concrete slab, twelve feet square, where the hammer stood.
Polished now.
We're standing on it.
We've set a table on it.
They are serving cured meats and olives on the footprint of the machine that built this city's industrial spine.
We balance our wine glasses on the ghost of the hammer.

[Verse 3]
I remember when Jim Cumming bought it. It was 1990.
The windows were all broken.
The place smelled of rust and pigeon shit.
He hired crews to gut the place. I saw them.
Men with no names in the newspaper articles, just muscle and sweat.
They pulled out the belts and the gears.
Left the bones.
Left the brick and the heart pine and this one, stubborn scar on the floor.

[Bridge]
This was the first one, you know.
The proof.
Before the goats moved in down on Foster Street.
Before Westside Provisions put a J.Crew where they used to process beef.
This place proved you could sell a painting in the same room where a thousand men lost their hearing to the noise of progress.
It proved the market for nostalgia was strong.

[Chorus]
And here we are.
The concrete slab, twelve feet square, where the hammer stood.
Polished now.
And we're standing on it.
We've set a table on it.
They are serving smoked salmon and capers on the footprint of the machine.
We balance our wine glasses on the ghost of the hammer.

[Outro]
The big freight elevator just started moving again.
Sounds just like a freight car coupling in the Norfolk Southern yard.