Downtown’s Fourth Street interchange project blooms as spring arrives

After more than eight years of organizing and planning, the $3 million landscaping project for the Fourth Street-U.S. Highway 27 interchange, an endeavor intended to create a “Gateway to Chattanooga,” is finally appearing in the ground.

The nonprofit Tennessee Interstate Conservancy, spearheaded by former Circuit Court Judge Neil Thomas III, joined forces with the Tennessee Department of Transportation, local governments, businesses and others to install landscaping using native and ornamental plants and make Chattanooga a model for interstate beautification across the state. The contract was awarded in March 2024 to Knoxville-based Stansell Electric Co.

Work completed so far includes trenching paths and boring lines under the existing roads for the irrigation system, planting bed preparations and dirt moving, with lots of trees and shrubs going into the ground with spring as warmer weather arrives. Now landscape crews will time their activities with Mother Nature as more flora and fauna are put in place, Jane Hampton Bowen, executive director of the conservancy, said by phone.

“Sometime in April and May, they have to do all the wildflower seeds, and they’ve got to mulch, ” Bowen said. “Once it’s all complete, then it will be turned over to the conservancy to maintain.

(READ MORE: Chattanooga’s U.S. Highway 27 project to become model for interstate beautification)

“They’re trying to wrap up by the end of the year,” she said.

There’s still more to accomplish by fall, state officials said.

“The contractor is not quite done,” Rae Anne Bradley, spokesperson for the state’s transportation agency, said Friday in an email. “The initial planting of all plants will be completed this week. The contractor will continue to work on sowing a few wildflower and prairie grass plots in some of the bare areas, spreading mulch around the project and putting the final touches on the irrigation system. There will be a couple more months of lane closures on the ramps to facilitate some of this work.”

Bradley said 3.5 acres have been planted.

“We have our first pop of color happening now with the saucer magnolias and forest pansy redbuds,” Bradley said. “Other trees will continue to flower throughout spring with more color showing up from the lilies and irises in late spring. This project was thoughtfully designed to have colors bloom in early spring and the show continue on throughout the fall.”

The project’s plantings include more than 300 trees and 100 shrubs, Bradley said. The bare areas will be planted with 6,000 individual ornamental grasses, over 800 purple cone flowers, almost 4,000 lilies, 1,000 irises and about 1.5 acres that will be planted with a wildflower and grass seed mix.

Thomas, the project’s brain-child, was traveling Friday and couldn’t be reached for comment, but he was jubilant last fall when the first plants were delivered.

“This is a really momentous occasion because it’s been eight years and five months in the making,” Thomas said in October during the project’s groundbreaking. “This started out in June 2016 in the offices of TDOT.”

(READ MORE: ‘Gateway to Chattanooga’ landscaping project at Fourth Street begins)

Thomas said he started making plans several years ago with Shawn Bible, who was then the transportation agency’s beautification office manager, and Thomas recalled where the idea came from and how its supporters joined together.

“This was a project that was conceived as the result of a trip through North Carolina to see the beauty of their development,” Thomas said in October, with his feet in the newly turned dirt. “The interstate conservancy is really a partnership of three groups — the state, the county and the city. The model was a partnership formed back in the 1980s — the Partners for Economic Progress — started by Joe Decosimo. What it does is it brings all the governmental entities and the private sector together.”

Tennessee’s neighboring state demonstrated the pride the North Carolina community had in itself, and it was this vision Thomas shared with Bible and others who would become stakeholders, he said. Thomas described the project as “beautification and economic development.”

The gateway work was originally planned as a much larger, single-contract project before the pandemic drove landscaping costs up and caused officials to delay.

The beautification work was first intended to cap off the $143 million Highway 27 widening and straightening project through downtown Chattanooga, completed in 2021 with a $1 million damage assessment against the contractor for missing a Jan. 28, 2020, completion deadline.

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The original comprehensive plan for the gateway — which had a pre-pandemic cost estimate of around $2.2 million — included more than 1,000 trees of various species, 4 to 5 acres of wildflower species, thousands of daylilies and irises — a state flower — on the 21 acres surrounding the interchanges at Fourth Street and M.L. King Boulevard.

The coronavirus hit Chattanooga in March 2020, driving up project costs exponentially and creating delays.

The first bids in June 2021 were far higher than appropriations and were rejected, so the project was divided, breaking out the Fourth Street interchange, or one-third of the entire project, to place costs nearer to original estimates. When the project drew only one bid in May 2022, it was too high again and was rejected.

The gateway project remained in limbo until the contract for the current work was awarded for the first third of the larger plan in March 2024.

The second portion of the project at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard remains in plans but has not been funded or scheduled, according to officials.

Contact Ben Benton at bbenton@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6569.