The Trolley Barn: Tracks of Time

Lyrics

You stand there still.
Old brick holding a new warmth.
I can almost hear the ghosts.

You remember, don't you?
The late eighteen-eighties.
Joel Hurt's grand idea humming in the air.
You smelled of ozone and hot grease.
Of metal filings on the concrete floor.
The streetcars would limp in, tired from their runs down Euclid Avenue, past the new Victorian porches.
You were the heart that kept the iron veins pumping.
A workshop for a waking dream.

The tracks of time run through your walls.
From a clang of steel and a mechanic's calls,
to the quiet hush before the vows.
You hold it all now.
From a place of work to a place of light.
A different kind of journey in the night.

Then the silence came.
The last car pulled away for good.
Dust motes danced in the shafts of light from broken panes.
Weeds pushed through the cracks in the floor.
And the shadow of the I-485 fell,
a concrete river threatening to swallow you whole.
You just waited.
Held your breath for decades.
A forgotten giant, sleeping in the quiet.

The tracks of time run through your walls.
From a clang of steel and a mechanic's calls,
to the quiet hush before the vows.
You hold it all now.
From a place of work to a place of light.
A different kind of journey in the night.

But then, we remembered.
The nineteen-seventies woke us up.
The sound of hammers wasn't just on steel anymore.
It was on splintered wood, on sagging porches.
The first festival, nineteen seventy-two, a new kind of energy.
We fought the freeway.
We chose the neighborhood.
We chose you.

Now you smell of polished wood.
Of champagne and summer flowers.
The clinking of glasses where tools once fell.
You still hear the echoes, I know.
The ghost of the trolley bell.