Like a small island alone in an ocean, First Congregational Church sits amid a sea of historical properties on M.L. King Boulevard, Patten Parkway and Lindsay and 10th streets.
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Staff Photo by Angela Lewis -- A cleaned and repaired stained-glass window is installed at First Congregational Church at the corner of M.L. King Boulevard and Lindsay Street. The church is among five properties that top Cornerstones Inc.’s preservation priority list.
“The sad thing is that it sits between three historic districts, and it didn’t get included in any of them,” said Ann Gray, executive director of Cornerstones Inc., a local preservation group established in 1994. “It’s a much more difficult case (for designation as a historical property) to make for one property.”
The church is among five properties that top Cornerstones’ priority list of Chattanooga buildings the group wants saved and integrated into communities in adaptive uses such as housing or businesses, Ms. Gray said.
“We are working with property owners to figure a way that becomes economically feasible for them to redevelop the property and also get the property into the community in a way that we need and can really use,” she said. “We are really walking them through the process of doing the preservation work.”
Cornerstones is one of a number of local foundations, nonprofit developers, artists’ groups and business owners who have worked together in the last several decades to revitalize and renew downtown Chattanooga. Those efforts have created an urban center teeming with specialty restaurants, theaters, tourist attractions — the Tennessee Aquarium is the centerpiece — and residential centers that have spilled out across the Tennessee River to the North Shore.
On the opposite end of downtown, the Southside features its artists in residence, living in condos above their galleries and exhibition spaces. The Renaissance effort travels east on M.L. King Boulevard, home of the annual Bessie Smith Strut, part of the yearly Riverbend Festival that pays homage to Chattanooga’s native daughter and blues queen.
The renaissance continues today. Local success has attracted outside attention from people such as Atlanta developer Ken Crisp, who is working with Cornerstones to convert First Congregational Church, home of one of Chattanooga’s oldest black congregations, into a multiuse building.
The building, built in 1905, will retain much of the original exterior appearance, including restoration of the original stained glass and rebuilding a tower torn down years ago when M.L. King was widened, Ms. Gray said.
The Terminal Hotel, the triangle-shaped Stong building on the east side of the Chattanooga Choo-Choo on Market Street, is an example of a concerted effort to save a building nearly lost to the elements. The 100-year-old building had been left untouched, except perhaps for vandals or vagrants, for 20 years. When its roof collapsed, it took the three-story building’s floors down to the basement with it. Without a roof, the building became unstable and was scheduled for demolition when Joe Sliger of Eastman Construction Co. bought the building for $171,000 in 2006.
“The building is not holding anything up,” Mr. Sliger said. “We have built something to hold the bricks up, including the roof. The bricks could go away and the building would still be there.”
Mr. Sliger is readying the building to open as the Terminal BrewHouse for owners Geoffrey Tarr, Ryan Chilcoat and Matt Lewis, also owners of Hair of the Dog, an English-style pub, on the corner of Market and Fourth streets.
Other structures require more planning and out-of-the-box thinking, but sometimes the original construction limits possibilities, said Ms. Gray, whose organization has the support of the private Lyndhurst Foundation and RiverCity Co., a private downtown development organization, to save the five properties.
The George Hotel on Market Street, across from the Choo-Choo, is one such property, she said. The current owner bought it with plans to convert it into condo housing. But the concrete walls — it was the city’s first fireproof hotel — limit its economic viability, she said.
“It turns out that to open it up for condos will be a challenge,” she said. “For it to be affordable, it needed to have three or four floors added. Well, you can’t add floors if it’s going to be in a historic district. It comes back to an economic standpoint that it’s best use is as a hotel. Maybe it could be some kind of boutique hotel.”
In the region
In neighboring Georgia, Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, one of the most popular Civil War sites in the nine states, has designated thousands of acres as protected areas. But some sites are in danger from suburban sprawl, according to the Civil War Preservation Trust.
Of that group’s top 10 most endangered sites, three are in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee. The closest one in Tennessee is near Nashville, and the Georgia site is in Marietta and the Alabama site is at Fort Morgan, on the Gulf Coast.
Building preservation is doing green work. Somebody’s got to do it, Ms. Gray said. “Building preservation is kind of a missing link in this whole green movement that has been coming on strong for the last year or two. All this talk about recycling and reuse is the same as talking about reusing buildings and the materials in them. That’s recycling at its best.”
