As drivers round Lookout Mountain on Interstate 24 and approach Chattanooga, they are greeted on their left by the majestic Tennessee River as it winds around storied Moccasin Bend but on their right by the rusted skeletal structure of the former Wheland/U.S. Pipe foundry site.
The latter doesn’t exactly say, “Welcome to the Scenic City.”
Longtime residents have hoped that would one day change, and that day may be if not in sight, then on the horizon.
Stakeholders in a 10-block area around the 141-acre site off South Broad Street gathered Thursday for the first of two Chattanooga Design Center-led public meetings expected to help guide future development there.
Since Wheland shut down in 2002 and adjacent U.S. Pipe in 2006, and the two sites eventually were combined for development, the site’s been the center of speculation about what its ultimate use might be.
In 2004, then-Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker said “to be 100 percent honest, I’d rather see a foundry operating there,” but he admitted “that can’t be the case.”
However, he said, the “worst case” would be the site sitting “there rusting for 20 more years.”
It’s only been 13, but those years included the Great Recession, from which the country and the city are just now firing on all cylinders after a slow recovery.
In between, according to Times Free Press archives, thoughts, suggestions or considerations for the site have included a multi-modal transportation center (June 2016), a multipurpose soccer complex (August 2015), a commercial town center development (December 2014), the site for a new Children’s Hospital (January 2014), a New Belgium Brewery, Bass Pro Shops or the expanded University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Sim Center (2012), space related to the supply chain for Volkswagen (September 2008), the Tennessee Valley Authority (April 2007), light industry (May 2006), “very attractive and useful public parks” (April 2006), a monumental art structure (May 2006), a national commercial or logistical center (May 2005), and “commercial and office and big-box retail (July 2004).”
In the years shortly after the plants’ closings, the cry for a return to the site of some sort of industry – Chattanooga’s heritage – was loudest. But with the advent of the Volkswagen manufacturing plant and other development at the Enterprise South site, it has been little mentioned over the past decade.
“Big-box retail” was seen in the cards in a July 2004 article, but a May 2011 story said developers had said “no to some generic big-box concepts.”
Two years after Wheland shut down, a development partner was definitive in not seeing housing in the site’s future. But two years later, and since then, many of the suggestions have been for a space “where people can live, work and play.”
A mixed-use site by far has been most frequently mentioned. That type of site, it has been suggested, could include retail, housing, hotels and even business development.
Which brings us to one of the latest suggestions – a new home for the Chattanooga Lookouts.
It’s no secret the team’s owners believe AT&T Field has a limited shelf life and would like a new stadium built more to their desires. A space on the Wheland/U.S. Pipe site could be part of a mixed-use development similar to The Battery Atlanta, the mixed-use space that was built to surround SunTrust Park, the new home of the Atlanta Braves in Cobb County.
The Battery Atlanta is described on ballparksofbaseball.com as “an entire entertainment district” that “includes apartments, offices, restaurants and more.”
Gary Chazen, one of the owners of the Chattanooga property, said “we’d welcome [a stadium] on our site.”
Former Lookouts owner Frank Burke used his own money to build AT&T Field in 2000. A decade and a half later, public money is often part of the equation for such builds.
Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke, who toured the site Wednesday, wouldn’t say whether he believes public money should be involved in such construction but said he’d have to “see what people want.”
In July 2015, though, speaking on the general redevelopment of areas such as the former Wheland Foundry/U.S. Pipe site, he said there might be a role for city dollars.
“There are many circumstances,” he said, “where you can help a project with infrastructure that builds jobs in an area and you can do that with the incremental tax dollars generated from that area rather than from other tax dollars.”
We’re with the 2017 Berke. Without knowing any final plans, how much potential property tax might be available, what all would be built and how much private money might go into a stadium, we would want to be cautious about committing specific funds. Nevertheless, its potential, as a 2003 Chattanooga Free Press editorial, said is “future lemonade” from the lemons of a rusty, skeletal manufacturing plant.
Indeed, as then-Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield said in 2006, “it’s rare that [an established] community has 100 acres so closely associated with downtown.”