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Remember When, Chattanooga? Westside businesses were sacrificed for urban renewal

Kopkin Grocery on Grove Street was owned by Sol Kopkin who lived to be 105 years old. / Photo by Pat St. Charles, Jr., contributed by ChattanoogaHistory.com.
Kopkin Grocery on Grove Street was owned by Sol Kopkin who lived to be 105 years old. / Photo by Pat St. Charles, Jr., contributed by ChattanoogaHistory.com. Kopkin Grocery on Grove Street was owned by Sol Kopkin who lived to be 105 years old. / Photo by Pat St. Charles, Jr., contributed by ChattanoogaHistory.com.

By Mark Kennedy 3 min read

In a one-sentence notice in March 1959, the Chattanooga News-Free Press reported that Buchanan Funeral Home on West Ninth Street had relocated to 2628 South Broad St.

The bigger story was that much of Cameron Hill and the surrounding streets on the western side of the city – including parts of West Ninth Street – had been leveled to make way for new highway and business construction.

Most of the affected area contained 19th century houses, some of them 25-room mansions built for affluent northern families who had moved to Chattanooga after the end of the Civil War.

But a fair number of the structures leveled in the name of progress were family-owned businesses: Places such as Kopkin Grocery and Buchanan Funeral Home and Capistrano Bar-B-Q.