Chattanooga Pulse

I grew up in the ‘noog. During most of my childhood, my family lived on Manchester Drive in Manchester Park—the poor man’s Stuart Heights. My dad worked for TVA and my mom stayed home with us kids.

In the early ’70s when I was starting school, Northgate Mall had just been built. Until then, there wasn’t much need to go out that way because it was all corn fields and cow pastures. My neighborhood was about a quarter a mile away from Highland Plaza, which was about as far north as anyone ever ventured.

My brother and I spent our days playing war in the woods, listening to the top rock station at the time, WFLI, watching “Shock Theater” with Dr. Shock and his sidekick Dingbat on TV-9 and cluelessly eating sandwiches served with a side of peace and love at one of the original Yellow Delis (where the Pickle Barrel is now).
Lately I’ve been fascinated with the period between 1970 and 1975, which may be why I’m writing about this. The post-Woodstock days brought Blaxploitation films, more TV game shows, double-knit polyester bell bottoms, peace signs and smiley faces, and albums like “Exile on Main Street,” “Layla” and “All Things Must Pass.” In fact, the early seventies might likely be one of the most prolific periods of pop culture history—especially in music and film. But I digress.
Anyway, my dad worked downtown, which was a world we never had any reason to visit other than an occasional lunch with him or a doctor’s visit to some specialist. Besides, it was disgusting.

At the time Chattanooga didn’t have any problems attracting companies looking for a place to build a manufacturing plant (like Volkswagen) because we offered all kinds of cheap land and labor, tax incentives, rail and river access and an endless supply of energy. But because our geographic make-up consists of a city surrounded by mountains there was nowhere for the smokestack soot to go but inward.

I remember many times as a kid riding through downtown when the haze was so bad my parents would have the turn on the headlights—in the middle of the day. You’d see people walking down the street covering their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs. In fact, things were so bad that in 1969 federal authorities deemed Chattanooga’s air quality the worst in the nation. Then things got worse.

By the mid-seventies, overseas competition forced some of our plants to move or close which left a lot of unemployed people in a dirty city full of empty behemoths sitting on contaminated land. The ‘noog was dying off.

That’s when the very first phase of our urban renaissance kicked off. At the time we didn’t expect people to pick up and move downtown from the suburbs. That kind of talk was ridiculous. Only bums and crazy people actually LIVED downtown. But we could make the city a place people might want to visit.

There were already barns on every two-lane in the South painted up with See Rock City and Ruby Falls. But we needed people to come further into town. In 1973, some businessmen resurrected the boarded-up Terminal Station made famous in Glenn Miller’s song “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” as a combination tourist attraction and hotel. And in 1976, the city opened Miller Park.

You could still shoot a gun down Market or Broad in the eighties and not hit a soul, but things were starting to happen. When the Walnut Street Bridge was closed to auto traffic in 1978, we turned it into a walking bridge instead of tearing it down (thank goodness for Indian burial grounds). And in 1992 the renaissance really started heating up with the opening of the Tennessee Aquarium.

Now we’ve got folks willing to pay top dollar to live behind Jax Liquors, problems with finding a meter space on any given day and the return of the Yellow Deli. We’ve got an open air market in one abandoned warehouse and a shopping mall in another. And we’ve got cities everywhere visiting us to see what we’ve done and how we’ve done it.

Fact is, Chattanooga has done a complete about-face since the seventies. And now that nearly 25,000 locals have voiced their ideas for change through the world’s largest community survey project—STAND—we’ll likely see even more than I ever imagined when I was a kid. And just like the faded glory of a worn out pair of Tough Skin jeans, it’s a good thing.

Chuck Crowder is a local writer and general man about town. His opinions are just that. Everything expressed is loosely based on fact, and crap he hears people talking about. Take what you just read with a grain of salt, but pepper it in your thoughts. And be sure to check out his wildly popular website  www.thenoog.com