Cooper: Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium

The Tennessee Aquarium, celebrating its 25th birthday, can be seen as the foundation of Chattanooga's renaissance.
The Tennessee Aquarium, celebrating its 25th birthday, can be seen as the foundation of Chattanooga's renaissance.

With apologies to "The Tonight Show's" Jimmy Fallon:

  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for 25 years as the foundation of Chattanooga's renaissance. Without you, we might still be seeking an entrée into a manufacturing-depleted, 21st-century economy.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for the derring-do to be something new downtown, especially a big fish tank - and one that celebrated freshwater aquatic life, of all things - in a mid-sized town.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for being built with private money, especially from your benefactor "father," Jack Lupton. Today, backers of such go-first projects would be in front of city and county officials with their hands out before they drew up the first plan.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for making your beautiful location along the waterfront a place to visit and not just to glance at when you drove by on the Olgiati or Market Street bridges or to maneuver through carefully, amid the urine-soaked cobblestones and broken Mad Dog 20/20 bottles, during the Riverbend Festival or if the Delta Queen paid a visit.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for becoming the new kid on the Chattanooga area tourism block. Rock City and Ruby Falls were feeling lonely, and Confederama - now the Battles for Chattanooga Museum - was getting tired of being referred to as the new kid on the block.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for the 23 million visitors you've brought to the city and the $3.3 billion worth of economic impact you've had on it.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, without which we might not have the 21st Century Waterfront, the Children's Discovery Museum, an expanded Hunter Museum of American Art, Renaissance Park and AT&T Field, among other downtown attractions.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for being in place so that independent and chain restaurants could congregate on Market and Broad streets and allow Chattanooga to have a nightlife again that isn't solely in the burbs.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for showing the way so the "corner" south of the river and north of Fourth Street and between the Olgiati Bridge and Broad Street no longer look like a reference from the pages of the book "The Land That Time Forgot."
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for not being stagnant but being proactive in adding attractions such as the IMAX Theater, the Ocean Journey building and the River Gorge Explorer.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for a presence that allows aerial photographs of the city to be taken straight on from just north of the river and not from a sideways angle that hid its former sad riverfront.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for being proposed by Urban Design Studio architectural students more than a decade before you opened and for being embraced by the Chattanooga Venture group that had the temerity in the 1980s to see the futures.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, that your location on one side of the Tennessee River shamed Chattanooga officials into doing something beautiful with the 13-acre Coolidge Park they owned on the other side. Named after a local World War II hero 50 years earlier, it was space unused by - but perfect for - the public. Its transformation, in turn, helped revive the entire North Chattanooga area from a squalid community where no one wanted to be seen, to a touristy, hip neighborhood just moments from downtown where everyone wants to be.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for being distinctive. All that you house might have been more cheaply displayed in a longer, wider building with a traditional roof, but your buildings' style - with their glass and angled roofs - adds panache to an already interesting attraction.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for employing 200 people and allowing more than 750 people to offer volunteer hours. You're not Hamilton County Schools or Erlanger Health System when it comes to employees, but you outflank most employers.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for Volkswagen. Maybe it's a stretch, but the German automobile manufacturer - and all the industry that followed it - might not have been attracted to a city where the last one out of downtown at night turned off the lights.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for not being satisfied to stock your tanks with the latest creatures from Aquarium Mart and instead to intently research, conserve and work with the biodiversity depicted in your original River Journey building, and eventually build the Conservative Institute on the Tennessee River on the campus of Baylor School to expand much of that work.
  • Thank you, Tennessee Aquarium, for playful otters, beautiful butterflies, intriguing penguins, scary sharks and fascinating jellyfish.

Happy birthday, Tennessee Aquarium. Here's to yournext 25.

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