Ponce de Leon Springs: Before the Brick

Lyrics

Remember the water?
Before the brick tasted the sun.
Before the shadow of the catalog fell.
There was just the spring.

The air smelled of cotton candy and damp earth.
A thrill on a wooden track, the clatter and the screams.
This was the electric park, under the Georgia pines.
Asa Candler's land, but not his ledger.
Just a place for a Saturday.
A place to get your feet wet in the cool, clear water
drawn from the ground itself.
Ponce de Leon Avenue was just a road to somewhere joyful.

But that was before the brick.
Before the railroad brought the inventory.
Before the biggest building in the Southeast
drank the spring dry.
There was a different kind of laughter here.
A lighter kind.
Before the brick.

The year was nineteen twenty-five.
The carousel music slowed.
The last wooden horse came to a halt.
They dismantled the coaster, piece by piece.
The laughter faded into the trees.
The ground grew quiet, waiting.
Waiting for the granite from Bellwood Quarry.
Waiting for a million red bricks to find their place in the sky.

And that was before the brick.
Before the railroad brought the inventory.
Before the biggest building in the Southeast
drank the spring dry.
There was a different kind of laughter here.
A lighter kind.
Before the brick.

Do you still feel it?
Underneath the concrete floors, the polished steel.
Under the weight of all that commerce, all that reinvention.
Is the water still there?
Does the memory of a child's hand, sticky with sugar,
still press against the foundation?
A ghost of a good time.
A phantom splash.

Just a whisper.
On Ponce de Leon Avenue.
A different kind of laughter.
Before the brick.