On Friday, in a ribbon-cutting ceremony, the renamed and renovated Patten Square in downtown Chattanooga – formerly Patten Parkway – officially will be reopened.
The former block-long linear park that runs between Georgia Avenue and Lindsay Street has been refashioned as a plaza where music, entertainment and commerce can mix, where there can be a more natural crowd flow from nearby Miller Park and Miller Plaza, and where the street can more easily be closed off for singular events.
Trees along the plaza eventually will provide shade, concrete benches afford seating and the $300,000 “Radiance,” a large-scale public art piece that resembles the trumpet-like opening of flowers by the group Futureforms, gives the space a focal point.
What’s missing from the $4.9 million renovation are the three military-related memorials that once seemed to give the parkway its reason for existence.
Oh, don’t get us wrong. The memorials would look out of place in the current space – like tailfins from a 1957 Cadillac on a new Tesla.