The Gated Green: An Exclusive Dream

Lyrics

They called it escaping the bustle.
A country quiet.
But the silence here has a sound.
It's the sound of a wall going up.
Not a stone wall.
Something... cleaner.

First, you pave the old path.
You give it a name that remembers just enough to forget the rest.
Cherokee Road.
A lovely name, isn't it?
Sounds historic.
Sounds... owned.
H. Gordon Jones wanted a view without the noise of the city.
He wanted the scent of pine and fresh paint, not coal smoke and commerce.
A place to land, perfectly framed.

And so we built the Gated Green.
A dream of columns and quiet afternoons.
No ironwork, no sentry box.
The gate is a shared glance on Tuxedo Road.
The gate is the right architect's number.
The gate is a ledger book, bound in calfskin, that simply says yes.

Francis Palmer Smith drew the lines.
Symmetrical.
Balanced.
American Colonial Revival.
A history you could order from a catalog, delivered fresh in brick and slate.
A clean past for a new man with new money.
And over on Habersham, Neel Reid was the ghost at the feast, setting the standard.
Everyone watched everyone.
A quiet, polite arms race of gables and gardenias.

And so we built the Gated Green.
A dream of columns and quiet afternoons.
No ironwork, no sentry box.
The gate is a shared glance on Tuxedo Road.
The gate is the right architect's number.
The gate is a ledger book, bound in calfskin, that simply says yes.

Nineteen twenty-three.
They built it all so fast.
An instant aristocracy on raw, red clay.
They bought the land, but they built the *enclave*.
A performance for an audience of themselves.
The hands that laid the stone? Invisible.
The women who polished the silver? Silent.
The only story allowed was the gleam on the surface.

The bustle is still out there.
You can hear it, sometimes, on a still night.
A distant hum.
But in here...
...in here, the green is always perfect.
The gates are still up.
They just learned to whisper.