Five arts organizations under one downtown Innovation Zone roof will be the ultimate employment of a little used brick building at the corner of 11th and King streets.
The Arts Building, as the building has now been dubbed, was a gift to ArtsBuild by Wehco Media and its chairman and chief executive officer, Walter E. Hussman Jr., the owner of the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
Appropriately, the three floors in the building - once called the Dover Building - have been named after the newspaper families that have fostered the Times Free Press and its parent newspapers over the past 137 years.
The first floor, which will house the Chattanooga Film Festival, is the McDonald floor, honoring Roy McDonald, the longtime publisher of the Chattanooga Free Press and under whose ownership the building was purchased in 1987.
The second floor, which houses Townsend Atelier, is the
Hussman floor, honoring the Hussman family which owns the combined newspaper today.
The third floor, which houses ArtsBuild, SoundCorps and Southern Lit Alliance, is the Holmberg floor, honoring Ruth Holmberg, longtime publisher of The Chattanooga Times and scion of the Ochs family which owned the paper for more than 100 years.
Hussman, an advocate for the arts in his home of Little Rock, Ark., where he owns the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, made a similar transaction there. He leased a building for $1 a year for 99 years to the Museum of Discovery, which is the oldest museum in the city.
Here, the now-renovated building's location convenient to the Innovation Zone, to City Hall and to other arts organizations can only enhance the importance of arts in a growing and thriving city.