Ponce City Market: From Sears to Soaring

Lyrics

Two point one million square feet of red brick.
Standing guard on Ponce de Leon since... forever.
You could feel the weight of it.
The biggest thing we'd ever seen.
I remember the smell. Cardboard and new cotton.
Nineteen twenty-six.
A whole world in a catalog, shipped from right here.
A train ran right into its belly, down in the dark.
And the trucks... they drove on ramps right up to the seventh floor.
Like a highway inside a giant.
Felt like the whole South was ordering its future from this building.
Same brick. Same bones.
From a Sears catalog page to a soaring new age.
The ghost of the freight elevator still groans.
But now it lifts up laughter, lifts up our days.
Ponce City Market, breathing again.
Yeah, Ponce City, breathing again.
Then came the quiet.
October, nineteen-ninety.
The doors shut. The big windows went dark.
Just a dusty echo where the shoppers used to be.
For a while, they called it City Hall East.
Felt like a joke. Piles of paper in a palace of commerce.
Just a giant holding its breath on the side of the road.
Same brick. Same bones.
From a Sears catalog page to a soaring new age.
The ghost of the freight elevator still groans.
But now it lifts up laughter, lifts up our days.
Ponce City Market, breathing again.
Yeah, Ponce City, breathing again.
And then... August, twenty-fourteen.
The air changed.
It wasn't cardboard anymore.
It was coffee. And spices. And fresh bread.
And the sound... that buzz...
People walking in right off the BeltLine trail.
The old train tracks that fed the giant...
Now bringing us all back to its heart.
Now I look up and see the lights on the roof.
Skyline Park.
A carnival in the clouds.
The giant's not just awake... it's dreaming.
Looking out over Atlanta.
Still serving the city.
Just in a different way.