Fifty years ago this week, in putting the final touches on its 1976 budget, the Chattanooga City Commission made it official by including money for studies for a new downtown bridge across the Tennessee River.
The Chattanooga Free Press noted of the moment: “The City Commission took action which, in effect, begins the official demise of the ancient Walnut Street Bridge.”
But nearly six months earlier, Chattanooga Mayor Pat Rose, perhaps in the kind light of his recent election, had a thought about the 1891 span that experts said had only four or five years of official life left.
“Can you just imagine it?” he wondered in a Chattanooga Times article. “If the length of it were lighted up at night and used as a mall for people to stroll across the river … the possibilities are tremendous.”
Rose went on to say such a bridge would be different from any other water crossing in the country — that he could envision parks, trolley cars, restaurants, shops, a walkable community.