How We Heal Chattanooga's Divides

In 1980, a consultant named Gianni Longo was commissioned to study Chattanooga and deliver an honest assessment of what was killing it.

His findings surprised people.

The smog that had made national news, the pollution Walter Cronkite had called out on network television when he named Chattanooga America's dirtiest city, had already been addressed. That was not the problem.

The problem, Longo said, was the city's divisions.

Black versus white. Old versus young. City versus county. Worker versus manager. Newcomers versus natives. A bitter hopelessness had settled in, particularly among poor and minority residents who had little say in city government. Leaders made decisions behind closed doors. Conspiracy theories ran rampant. The city felt rigged, run by a handful of powerful families who answered to no one.

A reknitting had to take place, Longo told his clients. When trust was lost, community planning became impossible. The divisions were not just a social problem. They were an economic one. They were the cancer.

That was forty five years ago.

The question Longo put on the table in 1980 is the same one Chattanooga is still trying to answer.

How do we heal this city's divides?

The answer that emerged in the mid-1980s was called Chattanooga Venture.

It was not primarily a development initiative. Most people remember it that way because of what it produced. The Tennessee Aquarium. The Bessie Smith Cultural Center. River City Company. The Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise. The Tennessee Riverpark. Those are the monuments. But monuments are not the method.

The method started with young people. Architecture students from the University of Tennessee were recruited to sketch visions of what a new shared downtown might look like. Those sketches were not handed to officials. They were taken to the public. Sixty five community meetings were held across the city, in libraries, in Black churches, at Kirkman Technical High School, at the Bethlehem Center in Alton Park, on the west side of town. People were asked one simple question.

What do you want?

An elderly Black man said he wanted safe places to fish. A mother wanted a paved walkway along the river so she could push her baby stroller. A woman wanted access to the water itself, which had been blocked for years by brush and private property.

That listening built the Riverpark. And on the day it finally opened, Eleanor Cooper, one of the architects of Venture, stood and watched something she had not anticipated. Children, Black and white, playing together along the river. Families of every background picnicking in the same space. She wrote later that they had not imagined the magic of that moment. They had not known how much they needed it.

That is what a shared vision looks like when it actually works.

But Venture carried within it the same forces Longo had warned about. Personalities accumulated power. Funding relationships developed. The independence that made the early work possible gradually gave way to structures that looked like the institutions they were built to challenge. What killed it was not opposition from outside. It was the slow erosion of the very things that made it work. The listening stopped. The power stopped being shared. The questions people were willing to ask changed when the money started coming from the same city government Venture had been built to hold accountable.

The monuments remained. The method was lost.

I have been watching Dr. Greg Laudeman try to recover that method for over a year now.

He is not easy to categorize. He has spent the better part of three decades building the literal infrastructure of connected communities. Broadband planning. Smart city consulting. Workforce development software. He has worked across the country figuring out how to use technology not just as a product but as a foundation. Something a community can stand on and build from.

He came back to Chattanooga carrying a question his entire career had been circling without quite landing on.

What does technology mean if it's not in the hands of all?

The Venture Study Group he leads has been gathering the people who built Venture before they are no longer here to say what they knew. Four key leaders have spoken so far. More conversations are planned. The Times Free Press covered his session with former Senator Bob Corker.

And I want to be honest about what I noticed when I saw that coverage.

There he is again. The retired leader. The familiar name. The safe story.

Greg is asking the right questions. The coverage of those questions though keeps pointing back toward the same people who have always been covered. A city trying to understand why its organizing keeps stalling cannot answer that question by interviewing only the people who were already in the room.

That question, where are the people, is not rhetorical. The people are here. They have always been here. What is missing is not their presence. It is who is listening, who is building with them, and who gets to shape what comes next before they ever get a chance to weigh in.

During our first phone conversation, Greg expressed the people Venture Study Group want to go out into the community. That instinct is right.

But the lesson Venture learned the hard way is that going out into the community is not the same as listening to it. The move that made Venture work in the beginning was not outreach. It was the sixty five meetings in Black churches and neighborhood centers where nobody explained anything to anybody. They just asked. What do you want? And then they built what people said.

That method disappeared when the power stopped being shared. When one person's vision replaced the community's. When the grants started coming from the same institutions Venture was supposed to hold accountable.

Greg is trying to recover Venture as it began, not as it ended. And his other passion project Chattanooga.Digital is asking the same question in the language of this moment. Who owns the tools? Who has the information? Who gets to participate in deciding what this city becomes?

The moment that effort becomes about one person, one organization, one grant cycle, it is already becoming something else. The lesson is right there in the boxes Dr. Eleanor Cooper spent years collecting and finally delivered to the Chattanooga Public Library. It is in the letters and the documents and the painful truth that the people who built something extraordinary watched it get absorbed by the very forces it was built to challenge.

We do not want a seat. We do not want a table. We want the structure and the land that the structure is on.

My hat is off to Greg and the people he has pulled together. What they are doing matters and I have been watching long enough to mean that.

What I keep coming back to is this.

Community is what we have. We have each other. And that does not require a grant or a platform or a retired senator's name on the invitation. It does not require a listening session in a building people have to find parking for. It can start at a kitchen table. A potluck. Sunday dinner. Coffee with two people who decide to stop waiting for someone to organize them and start talking honestly about what they are seeing.

That does not take permission.

It takes connectedness and intention.

We have the power to secure any reality we want. That is the power of the people. Where the people are, there is power. But power without vision is just energy with nowhere to go.

Lakweshia Ewing, a Chattanooga entrepreneur, said it plainly at a community gathering not long ago. She leaned forward and spoke with the kind of certainty that stops a room.

"I hate to get biblical. But where there is no vision, the people perish."

Chattanooga is overdue. Not for another initiative. Not for another plan handed down from the same rooms. For a vision that belongs to everyone. One built across racial lines, across economic lines, across every boundary this city has used to keep its people from recognizing what they share.

The vision is not gone. It has not been built yet.

That is the difference.

The Read House has stood at the corner of Broad and MLK since 1925, a ten-story monument to the city's appetite for reinvention. But the building's roots go deeper than most people know. In 1847, Thomas Crutchfield Sr. built the Griffin House on that same ground, a hotel positioned directly across from the train station to catch the constant flow of travelers moving through. His son inherited it, sold it in 1861 fearing the Civil War would destroy it, and watched it survive the war only to burn to the ground six years later in an oil room fire.

Dr. John Read and his wife Caroline rebuilt on the same site in 1871. Three stories. A restaurant, a café, a grill, a Turkish bath, and a railroad ticket office built right inside the lobby. Their son Samuel took over at nineteen and eventually ordered the renovation that produced the ten-story building standing today.

Not long after that rebuild, something happened in room 311 that the hotel has never quite shaken.

The story, passed down through decades of flickering lights and unexplained footsteps, is that in the late 1920s a woman named Annalisa Netherly was beheaded in the bathtub by a jealous lover. Whether the story is true or legend, what followed has been documented by guests and employees for nearly a century. Shadowy figures. Running water with no source. Lights that behave on their own schedule.

The same room later housed Al Capone in the early 1930s, when he was passing through Chattanooga en route to Atlanta for a federal trial. Rebar was bolted to the windows to keep him from escaping. The hotel recently reinstalled it so visitors could see what containment looked like.

In 2018, the Read House was renovated. Room 311 was restored to exactly what it would have looked like when Annalisa Netherly was a guest. No television. No modern fixtures. Victorian furniture, a clawfoot tub, a pull chain toilet. On demolition day, construction crews could not get the door open. Keys failed. Force failed. They eventually had to saw through it.

The room is available for overnight stays.

Stay at your own peril.

25 readers responded.

Option A — Stories that give me facts and let me decide what to think. 8 votes

Option B — Stories that go deep into communities I do not know well. 7 votes

Option D — Stories that celebrate what makes Chattanooga worth living in. 7 votes

Option C — Stories that hold people in power accountable. 3 votes

These answers will shape how we approach sourcing and framing stories going forward. Thank you to everyone who took your time to respond.

Summer is here and Chattanooga's swimming holes are calling. But a local nonprofit wants you to know what is actually in the water before you go.

WaterWays is conducting weekly E. coli tests at six popular swim spots across the region through Labor Day. The goal is not to scare people out of the water. It is to show how dramatically water quality can shift from one week to the next, particularly after rain.

Here is where things stood the week of June 17th, according to their most recent report:

Big Soddy Creek Gulf — Clear. Normal range.
Suck Creek — Elevated. Proceed with caution.
Greenway Farm — Elevated. Proceed with caution.
Audubon Acres — Elevated. Proceed with caution.
Middle Creek — High. Avoid swimming.
Rainbow Lake — High. Avoid swimming.

Recent rainfall pushed contamination levels up across most sites. E. coli in freshwater comes from animal and human waste runoff and signals the likely presence of other waterborne pathogens. Clear water does not mean clean water. Stagnant water with visible film or algae is a warning sign regardless of how inviting it looks.

WaterWays updates results weekly. Follow them at mywaterways.org before your next swim.

Closets By Design: Tired of clutter and disorganized spaces? Closets by Design of Chattanooga creates custom closets, pantries, garages, wall beds, entertainment centers, and more. Get a hassle free estimate.

C&C Nursery and Landscape: The warm weather is here and planting season is just around the corner. No project is too big or small. Get a free quote.

Restoration 1 of Chattanooga: Mold can sneak up on your fast and often hides behind walls, under flooring, or in crawl spaces. Don’t ignore the warning signs, call us today for an inspection!

The Sweet and Savory Classroom: Looking for a fun night out with your spouse? Our Ramen Date Night class will teach you how to make real ramen! Use code ‘Explorer’ for $20 off!

The Chattanooga Way has become shorthand for downtown development. The riverfront. The aquarium. The renaissance. All of the things that make our city seem perfect and polished.

But when I look at the actual history of this city, what I find is something so special. Ordinary people, across every divide this city has ever had, deciding that what was in front of them was not good enough and doing something about it anyway. Not because conditions were perfect. Not because the timing was right. Because they could not leave things the way they were.

This city has done that before. More than once. In moments that looked, from the outside, like they had no reason to succeed.

We are in one of those moments again.

Maybe what Chattanooga needs right now is not a new initiative or a new name for what we are trying to do.

Maybe what we need is that old Chattanooga tenacity.

— Marie

What do you want Chattanooga to become?

No multiple choice. No options to pick from. Just your answer in your own words.

Hit reply and tell us. We are listening.

Previous Edition: Joan McClane and the Love That Breaks the Story

Next Edition: Things To Do In Chattanooga This Weekend June 19–25