1920s Buckhead: A Fever Dream

Lyrics

I remember the air.
It tasted of pine sap and wet plaster.
A motorcar buzzing like a trapped fly.
They couldn't build me fast enough.

First, the chains. The surveyors' chains, slicing the old woods into squares.
Then the plats, unrolling on the hoods of new automobiles.
A name whispered in the Georgia heat: Pringle. And Smith.
Francis Palmer Smith, with his blueprints like scripture.
Three hundred houses rising from his pen.
And I was one.
A thought on paper, then a trench in the red clay.

It was a fever dream, the twenties.
A roar of saws and ambition.
The clang of hammers on nails, the shouts of men whose names are lost.
Building a brand new past, overnight.
This Buckhead fever, burning bright.

Down the way, Neel Reid was casting his own spells in brick and limestone.
Tuxedo Road, a parallel universe of grandeur.
And H. Gordon Jones, he walked this raw mud.
He saw the plans, he saw the future, he pointed and said, "Here."
My skeleton of fresh-cut pine rose to meet his gaze.
Another column in the long, fast race.

It was a fever dream, the twenties.
A roar of saws and ambition.
The clang of hammers on nails, the shouts of men whose names are lost.
Building a brand new past, overnight.
This Buckhead fever, burning bright.

The Great War was over.
The money was new, and it needed a shape. A solid shape.
American Colonial Revival, they called it.
A memory of a country that never quite was, built on a trail
whose name they kept but whose story they paved.
Cherokee.
A whisper under the new asphalt.

Then, silence.
Or something like it.
The year turned 1923.
The dust settled on my new floors.
The fever broke.
And I was standing.
Ready for the first key in the lock.