Ninth Street Remembers

My pops would get the pins early. That was the first sign summer was really here.

He would come home with them in a little envelope, careful with them like they were something more than plastic and a safety pin, and just like that the whole family knew. It was time. There was no discussion needed, no calendar consulted. Riverbend and the Strut were not something we decided to do every year. They were something that happened to us, the way the seasons happen to you, and we simply moved with it.

Cousins and other kin who had left Chattanooga years before would start texting weeks out, asking what days everybody was going, rearranging their own lives around a festival back home because missing it felt like missing something you could not get back. We would walk downtown together, pins clipped on, following the smell of barbecue and turkey legs before we ever thought about music. Lemonade sweating in somebody's hand. Rhythm and blues drifting from somewhere I could not always see, music I was too young to understand but old enough to feel settle into my chest anyway.

I did not know back then that I was standing inside something rare. I know it now, in the specific way you only know a thing after it starts slipping away from you.

Natives still call it Ninth Street. Some call it the Big Nine, and they say it with a certain weight, the way you say the name of somebody you loved who is gone but whose presence you can still feel in a room. For generations that street was the heartbeat of Black Chattanooga, its own self contained world of clubs and shops and churches and Sunday afternoons that stretched on forever. That history did not vanish when the city renamed it Martin Luther King Boulevard, it got folded inside the new name, still beating there for anybody who knew to listen for it.

So when the very first Riverbend was being built in the summer of 1982, and organizers decided the festival needed a companion rooted in jazz and blues, there was really only one place it could live. Ninth Street, because the neighborhood was never a backdrop. It was the point.

A local paper covering that first Strut called it a sea of humanity, dotted with brightly colored balloons. Young and old, Black and white, the hip and those earnestly trying to be hip, all converging on that one street, strutting from stage to stage on flatbed trucks parked at the corner of MLK and Georgia Avenue. One resident who lived on that street said it plainly to a reporter that night. Oh, I just think this is grand. We need to have more of this.

That sentence has stayed with me, because it is exactly right. A neighborhood opened its arms wide enough to hold a whole city for one night, and asked for more of that.

Riverbend did not arrive the way we remember it, huge and polished with barges and hundreds of thousands of people. It arrived small and uncertain, held together by a handful of people who believed in something the rest of the city had not seen yet. That belief traces back to 1980, to a dinner at Sid Hetzler's home, where he could not stop talking about a festival he had just witnessed in Charleston and what something like that might mean for Chattanooga. He and Mickey Robbins spent the following year chasing that feeling, securing a grant, taking city leaders south to see it themselves.

The first real test came that summer of 1982, three ticketed concerts at Engel Stadium meant to prove the idea could hold weight. It nearly did not, losing the young festival close to one hundred thousand dollars, enough to end the dream before it became one. But that August, down at the water, Riverbend found the shape we would come to know, and on Ninth Street that same summer, the Bessie Smith Strut opened right alongside it. Born in the same breath, meant to be carried together from the start.

In 2012, city leadership pushed to move the Strut off Ninth Street entirely, folding it into Riverbend on the riverfront, citing safety concerns. The chairman of the board protecting the Strut's cultural home said it plainly. Moving it off MLK would be like swapping the real thing for a generic brand.

He was right, and it took the people who actually lived on that street, quiet donors nobody ever thanked publicly, and the leadership of the Bessie Smith Cultural Center standing up to keep it where it belonged. They put up fencing that year, tightened security, and turned some things that used to feel effortless into things that now required planning. The Strut survived, but something in the air had shifted, and some of the people who were there noticed it right away, even while grateful it survived at all.

By the middle of that decade, people were saying out loud what a lot of us had only felt quietly for years, that the Strut was drifting away from Riverbend instead of standing shoulder to shoulder with it, that the root of the thing was getting harder to find underneath rising prices and reworked footprints.

I do not think it happened all at once. A city loses things the way a house slowly stops feeling like home, one price increase, one fence, one small decision at a time, until you look up and the place looks familiar but does not feel like yours anymore.

Last year I posted about Riverbend, not expecting much. What came back was grief dressed up as memory, hundreds of comments, thousands of shares, people my age and decades older, people who left Chattanooga and people who never did, all saying some version of the same thing. We miss what it actually was.

That grief runs deepest in the people who were there from the start, the ones who remember Ninth Street before fences and admission gates were the price of feeling safe there. Other events have tried to fill that space since, and none of them come close, because none of them were built the way these two were, on purpose, together, out of a real belief that a city as clannish and divided as Chattanooga could still find one week a year to set that down and come home to each other anyway.

We cannot really have one without the other. That was true in 1982 and it is still true now.

Riverbend was never supposed to be just a concert series floating on the river, and the Strut was never supposed to be a smaller cousin left to fend for itself. They were built as two halves of one whole idea, that this city could bridge its own divides for a little while every summer, that a family could walk from barbecue on Ninth Street to music on the water and feel, for one week, like the whole town actually belonged to everybody standing in it.

That is what we are asking for back. Not something bigger or fancier, just the one that used to feel like coming home, pins on our shirts and the whole family walking toward something we could not wait to get to.

Union General Ulysses S. Grant made the Whiteside mansion on Cameron Hill his headquarters while in Chattanooga. The house’s commanding view of the city and the Tennessee River made it an ideal command post. From here, Grant directed key operations of the Chattanooga Campaign, including preparations for the Battle of Missionary Ridge in late 1863.

Col. James A. Whiteside lived in what was Chattanooga’s first brick house, built around 1840 by Thomas Crutchfield at 415 Poplar Street. The two-story mansion, with its twin columns and front portico, occupied an entire city block. The self-sufficient estate included a detached kitchen, servant houses, an 80-foot limestone well, a brick bath and spring house, cistern, well lot, log barn, and later a coal and carriage house.

The home also served as a civic landmark. It hosted the first meeting of Chattanooga’s Protestant Episcopal parish in 1853. Col. Whiteside later financed a temporary chapel and donated land for St. Paul’s Church.

After Whiteside’s death in 1861, Union forces seized the house and expelled his widow, Harriet, and their children. Despite artillery damage, the mansion survived the war. Harriet returned in 1865 and spent years in legal battles over the family estate. The house was sold in 1887 to W.L. Dugger (who had helped build it as a young man) for $10,000. It was demolished around 1926 and later replaced by a government funded public housing development.

Every person who grew up here has a Riverbend story or a Strut story sitting somewhere close to the surface, waiting for a reason to come back up. Maybe it is a parent handing out pins the way mine did. Maybe it is a first kiss on Ninth Street, a grandmother who danced every year until she physically could not anymore, a friend group that only reunited once a summer because of this festival.

We want to hear it. Reply to this email and tell us your favorite memory of Riverbend or the Bessie Smith Strut, whatever year, whatever moment, whatever made it yours.

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No river ever holds the same water twice.

The Tennessee moving past the city tonight is not the river your grandparents watched, not the one that carried the first Riverbend crowds down to the water in 1982, not even the one that was here yesterday. Every drop keeps moving, keeps leaving, keeps getting replaced by whatever is coming down from upstream. And yet we still call it the same river. We still give it the same name, still trust it to show up in the same place every summer, still build our lives and our festivals around its banks like it owes us that constancy.

Maybe that is the trick of it. A river is never still, never the same twice, and somehow that is exactly what makes it feel permanent. Not because nothing changes, but because the shape stays even while everything inside it moves on.

People are like that too, if you let them be. You are not the same person who first walked down to that water as a child. Almost nothing about you is literally the same as it was then. But the shape of you, the part that keeps returning to the same places, the same people, the same pull toward home, that part holds even while everything else keeps flowing through and past.

Maybe the invitation this month is to trust that. Not to worry about what has changed in you or around you, but to notice what still pulls you back to the water anyway.

— Marie

Previous Edition: From the Porch to the Pivot