Chattanooga reborn: loads of fresh attractions and a spiffy new look beckon visitors to southeastern Tennessee's "choo choo" city - City Of The Month

Travel America, Nov-Dec, 2002 by Tom Bross

For "what's-new" overviews of mid-city Chattanooga, take a hike across the Walnut Street Bridge. Abandoned for years as an unsafe eyesore, the century-old, steel-truss span was restored and then reopened as a pedestrian walkway in 1993. At its southern end, make your way to a lengthy, cliff-hugging Riverwalk curving alongside the Tennessee River. On the opposite bank, via the auto-free bridge, Coolidge Park covers six acres of greenery featuring a transplanted antique carousel where kids--and always a fair number of grownups--ride on hand-carved animals.

Such niceties didn't exist a couple of decades ago. The riverfront was a rustbelt; steel foundries spewed fumes, often heavy enough for afternoon dimouts. Downtown businesses either went bust or moved to outlying shopping malls and bland office parks. But then came a resurgence of civic pride, and with it all-out efforts at bringing back environmental livability.

Visitor attractions have emerged, too. topped by the Tennessee Aquarium. This architectural showpiece of striped brickwork and triangular glass pinnacles dominates a plaza adjoining riverside Ross's Landing Park, previously a quagmire of slag heaps and worn-out coke furnaces. Inside the world's biggest freshwater aquarium, skylights spread natural illumination over brooks and streams, ponds, living forests, and a misty-humid Delta Country swamp. They're habitats for 9,000 creatures--ranging from catfish to snapping turtles, Amazonian piranhas to Surinam toads, Gila monster lizards and "eyelash" vipers, plus deep-diving otters and a giant alligator.

An eastward Riverwalk trek beneath the bridge gets you uphill by way of a zigzag ascent, which means you've reached the Bluff View Arts District. It's an affluent neighborhood with an appropriate name, locale of Chattanooga's Hunter Museum of American Art, housed in a neoclassical Old South mansion connected by a spiral stairwell to a modernistic annex.

In the permanent collection are works by Mary Cassatt, Thomas Hart Benton, Andy Warhol, and Hudson River School landscape painters (notably Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt). Also see 18th and 19th century portraiture, abstract art, and a gallery exhibiting Ansel Adams and Edward Weston photographs. Outdoors, watch for Alexander Calder's Pregnant Whale mobile.

Two gardens embellished with avant-garde sculptures are up here on the limestone bluff. So is the Houston Museum, devoted to decorative arts--mainly rare glassware and porcelain in myriad shapes and styles. Directly across Second Street, the free-admittance River Gallery displays contemporary arts and crafts, with glassblowing demonstrations as an added attraction. The Spanish-influenced building stands right next door to Rembrandt's Coffee House, pleasantly situated for a caffeine-and-pastry break on the terrace.

No American city operates a larger fleet of battery-powered public buses. Passengers pay zero to use downtown's non-polluting Electric Shuttle service on its north-south, 20-stop Broad Street/ Market Street route between the aquarium's plaza and what opened way back in 1909 as the Southern Railroad's Terminal Station.

For many people, mentioning this city's train-travel era evokes golden-oldie memories of swingtime band leader Glenn Miller. His rendition of Chattanooga Choo Choo ("Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer, than to have your ham 'n eggs in Carolina")--composed for a 1941 movie musical, Sun Valley Serenade--quickly reached Number One on radio's "Hit Parade" and became a best-seller in record stores across the nation.

Thirty years later, developers spent $8 million, thereby saving the scheduled-for-demolition station complex by opening the Chattanooga Choo Choo Holiday Inn. Guests can choose between standard accommodations and sleeping in converted parlor cars (two deluxe suites per car). A dozen shops and a fancy restaurant are on-site, along with a model railroad museum and formal gardens where 500 roses bloom from spring through fall.

At this southern edge of downtown, the Electric Shuttle's Market Street segment provides free, easy access to Warehouse Row--another urban-renewal success story. Hefty railroad storage buildings constructed during 1906-1912 now house a sizeable batch of outlet stores in the familiar-brand realm of Bass, Coach, Tommy Hilfiger, Polo/ Ralph Lauren, Ellen Tracy, Geoffrey Beene, Nautica, and Nine West.

Lookout Mountain looms across a sharp bend in the river. Unless you're driving, reach the summit (and Chattanooga's priciest suburb-with-a-view) aboard the Incline Railway, dating from 1895. Pulled by electric-motor-powered cables up and down the west slope, glass-roofed cars climb an ultra-steep 72.7-degree grade while nearing the summit. Hope for a sunny day when you make the trip. The Upper Station's observation platform can't be beat for metro-area and Tennessee Valley panoramics--and, in optimum weather conditions--Great Smoky Mountains promontories 100 miles away.

Civil War buffs know about the city's importance as a rail junction augmented by riverboat supply landings, surrounded by mountains and heavily forested ridges, and strategically situated as the "Gateway to the Deep South." The Tennessee/Georgia state line bisects Lookout Mountain, where, on the fog-shrouded heights, Union forces beat the Confederates in November 1863's Battle Above the Clouds. Missionary Ridge, Signal Mountain, Orchard Knob, Brown's Ferry, and the Battle of Chickamauga are in the history books, too. It was from captured Chattanooga that General Sherman began his infamously destructive "March to the Sea."