Chattanooga Chooed Up: Art and Urban Decline

The first time I visited Chattanooga, 15 years ago, some University of Tennessee poets took me to the Chattanooga Choo Choo for drinks. It was dark outside, and the inside was Railway Terminal Beaux Arts--tasty, in short. As a Tex Beneke/Glenn Miller nut, I was in six-and-a-halfth heaven, humming, "Track 29, boy you can give me a shine."

Alas, in the light of today, from the outside, the Chattanooga Choo Choo is a tiny isle of glitz in a sea of derelict hotels and abandoned restaurants. Hilton surrendered its franchise; the hotel and convention complex went bankrupt last year. Their last best hope is that the new Holiday Inn franchise will snatch their Chattanooga chestnuts out of the fiscal fire. I hope they make it.

With determined euphoria, the courtly young man in charge of the hotel showed me the plushy Victorian bedroom in one of the Pullman cars that were the center of tourist attention when the "destination resort" opened in the 1970s. He let me peek into the "temporarily" shuttered "Dinner in the Diner" dining car, and I swallowed hard for old time's sake. It's going to be a cliffhanger.

Outside, you see signs telling you to drive left several blocks for a Days Inn, or right for a Best Western on Martin Luther King Boulevard (that poor martyr has more tacky streets named after him than any other folk hero I can think of). Market Street at the Choo Choo end is a visual shambles.

But walk up the main drag toward the Civic Forum at Tenth Street, where you can get all the tourist brochures for the city and the region you could ask for. The aggressive affability of the tourist promotion personnel gave me the impression they don't have many visiting journalists to spiel to.

Watch on your left for the handsome new headquarters for the TVA, a great social experiment whose flagging economic status makes you nervous too. There's an excellent Corten and aluminum mural on the 11th Street side.

And kitty-corner is the Bicentennial Library, where the second-floor local history room offers a lively and accessible collection of books on local architecture (including dam architecture, a genre that's big locally).

The center swatches of Market Street are "coming back," as they say hopefully. Miller Brothers' old department store is being recycled as Blue Cross offices. But beyond, it dinges up again. It so saddens me to see the perky commercial architecture of the late 1880s and beyond bedraggled, or--even worse--hoked up modernoidly.

In my continuing anthropological lark of getting shaved in every city and country of the world (before my beard dies), I dropped into the Barber College, where a charming student told me tartly that they don't shave with straight razors any more. "Would you-all want a student to use a straight razor on your pretty old face?"

Her matronly supervisor interposed with a more candid explanation: "We don't shave any more for fear of AIDS." The student, I'm sorry to report, didn't get my lame sally: "I don't mind a straight razor if the barber is straight."

Right around the corner from the Barber College is the new Regional History Museum, a recycled school building. It's not up to full speed yet, but the exhibits they were installing were definitely visitable: a medical history display, one on local radio history and a Vietnam Memorial exhibition.

The museum is mercifully free of kitsch and contains solid work like the News Press journalist John Wilson's substantive history of the city.

But the best reason for visiting Chattanooga is its Hunter Museum of Art. High on a bluff overlooking the Tennessee River, it is arguably the most beautifully sited museum in the United States. And its structural glory is an Albert Paley "Fence" joining the stately old mansion--the original Hunter--to its dynamic modern wing.

There is a splendid roof sculpture garden where Nature competes ruthlessly with Art for your undivided attention.

When I visited, there were two splendid exhibitions--one on paper sculpture from all over the country, the other on quilts and tufted bedspreads. The latter was curated by Bets Ramsey, a local quilter whose marvelous Josef Albers-like square miniquilt has been a joy to my eyes ever since I bought it in 1978 at her one-person show at the Hunter.

Her husband is the UT poet Paul Ramsey--so the two of them are a veritable TVA powerhouse for culture among choosier Chattanoogans.

Mrs. published a book on Tennessee quilts that's on sale in the excellent museum shop, where I bought my cat Tobey a stunning carved cat about to pounce from Indonesia. That's a long jump, but Tobey is not very cultivated yet.

Leave enough time for the stately house across the street. It houses the glass collection of a benignly obsessed woman who took the small profits from her downtown millinery store and invested them in antiques. I'm not big on glass, but that lady's eye was unimpeachable, and I delighted in traipsing in her tracks.

Take a taxi back to your point of departure. They're cheap. Mine had a sign saying the driver took nothing bigger than a $5, and his lush accent and gabby baedekering about the town were even better than a walk through the lovely old neighborhoods where the rich once lived.

I'm going back soon to take in all of the regional attractions you'd need a rented car to catch. The Choo Choo may be chuffing, but the town has a pace and a friendliness that I relished.

Reprinted from Welcomat - After Dark, Hazard at Large October 18, 1989