“The establishment of a system of parks and pleasure grounds for a rapidly growing city is one of the most difficult and responsible duties that ever falls to a city government,” landscape architect John Nolen wrote in a report to the Chattanooga Board of Parks Commissioners in 1911.
In his “Report and General Plan for a Park System for Chattanooga,” the Cambridge, Mass., professional warned commissioners that “failure to select sites discriminantly, to design them for specific purposes, and to confine their use to those purposes is to lose to a considerable degree the benefits that might otherwise accrue to the people.
“[T]he city,” he wrote in the commissioned report, “is at present backward in the matter of parks.”
At the time, Nolen said, Chattanooga had less than 100 acres in parks, no playgrounds, and no parkways or pleasure drives connecting the city with federal parks on Missionary Ridge or in the Chickamauga Battlefield area.
At the time, the city limits the landscape architect was considering ran from Missionary Ridge west to Stringers Ridge and what was then called Hill City (now North Chattanooga or North Shore), south to the Georgia line in Rossville and east to the Chickamauga Creek entrance to the Tennessee River.