Miguel Lopez, Juan Lopez, and Cidani Agustin-Perez play soccer at East Lake Park on Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2015, in Chattanooga, Tenn. The city is planning to refurbish the park.Can a few thousand fish pull a neigh borhood together?
Lisa Davis, president of the East Lake Neighborhood Association, thinks it – plus other improvements to the community’s park – is worth a try.
So does the city of Chattanooga and the Lyndhurst Foundation, which are splitting $800,000 in costs to refurbish East Lake Park.
The park – home to the city’s first zoo, and once a destination for residents and visitors – is the centerpiece of a what used to be a solidly middle-class community at the foot of Missionary Ridge.
But it has fallen on hard times. The cottages and bungalows that can sell for several hundred thousand dollars in revived city neighborhoods sell for much less in East Lake – in the $24,000 to $110,000 range. Crime, especially that associated with drugs and gangs, has spread. Before the city put a stop to it, some landlords chopped houses into a mishmash of poorly maintained apartments.
Neighborhood association members and those working with them hope the park’s renovation will be the catalyst for a better neighborhood.
East Lake began as a mill town, with many of the houses home to mill workers. It also was the site of a factory manufacturing wagons for use in the Spanish-American War, according to Damon Davis, Lisa’s husband. In its earliest days, it was home to the Oxley Zoo, the city’s first. But in 1915, city officials decided the facility was unsanitary and the animals not very attractive and packed off the zoo to Warner Park, where it is today.
East Lake also was Chattanooga’s first park, created on land donated by businessman C.E. James in 1896. The lake was stocked with hundreds of thousands of goldfish in 1908, some of which were sold to raise money to help maintain the park, according to accounts at The Public Library.
A similar urban fishing program ran in the mid-1990s, but the lake was overfished and the stock ran out, according to city Public Works Director Lee Norris.
Lisa Davis thinks it’s time to try again.
“I think it is a fabulous idea,” she said. “Most of the kids here don’t have a lot of experience with getting to know Mother Nature and learning how to take care of their environment.”
Stocking the lake with fish is just part of the city’s plan, which calls for draining and cleaning the lake, adding fountains and improving walkways.
The neighborhood association will be given the keys to the concession stand in the pavilion on the northeast corner of the park. Several association members previously ran a coffee shop, Davis said, and they plan to open on weekday mornings, providing free coffee to teachers at nearby East Lake Elementary School.
“They are involved with the school,” Davis said, “and this will give them the opportunity to meet with the teachers and get to know them and determine their needs.”
Davis hopes the lake and the park around it will again become the hub of the community.
“In its day, this park functioned for its community like Facebook does today,” said Damon Davis. “It was the way everyone kept in touch with each other.”
There were Rook tournaments and Easter egg hunts, and a trolley line ran from downtown and circled the edge of the park, he said.
But starting in the 1950s and ’60s, residents began moving to bigger homes on larger lots in the suburbs, and too many houses were bought by absentee landlords who collected rent and did little to maintain their properties.
East Lake today is a community of about 1,500 homes, wedged between Rossville Boulevard and Missionary Ridge between 29th and 43rd streets. Cutting through it is Dodds Avenue, lined with auto repair shops and small storefronts, some of them empty.
To get a better idea of the neighborhood’s residential potential, 12th Avenue, which parallels Dodds, is a better choice. It features rows of small, wood-frame homes, most from the 1920s and 1930s.
The neighborhood is racially diverse – pretty evenly divided among whites, blacks and Hispanics, according to Lisa Davis. The neighborhood group hopes to keep it that way.
“We don’t want it be gentrified,” Davis said. “We want to make it a place where people have a home and not just rent until they can move out.”
She and her husband moved to East Lake from rural Rock Spring, Ga., three years ago, she said, after her children left home.
“Lots of people are moving back [to town] after their kids are gone,” Davis said.
Davis said she is happy with the aid the neighborhood has been getting from the city. She knows the name of the police precinct commander and said local police officers regularly show up at neighborhood events.
Schools are a concern, however.
Both East Lake Elementary and the East Lake Academy of Fine Arts got low ratings on the Tennessee Department of Education’s annual school report card, partly because of low English language reading skills among the community’s growing Hispanic population.
The neighborhood group and its efforts also get good marks from the city.
“East Lake does it better than most any other neighborhood association,” said city Director of Economic Development Donna Williams.
The neighborhood group, which has about 35 members, has an ambitious agenda. It held its first festival in August, with food and a dozen musical acts. About 500 people showed up. They’re working to get free Wi-Fi in the park during daytime hours, so teachers can bring students for after-school study programs.
Davis dreams of a community garden up by the tennis courts, where residents could trade volunteer work at the concession stand for fresh vegetables.
Work on the park should start this spring, Norris said.
“This was a great gathering place for this community,” he said. “We want to try to restore it to its original grandeur.”
Davis said she believes East Lake is making progress. She and her husband were at the library recently and noticed newspaper articles on East Lake from 1983.
“They were saying exactly the same things that we are saying now,” Davis said. “The park needs to be redone, we need to deal with the renters. These things hadn’t been fixed. But now things are happening.”
Contact staff writer Steve Johnson at sjohn son@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6673.