An early blueprint of the South Broad District's future unveiled Thursday includes a multi-use minor league baseball park anchoring an array of housing and new retail and green space.
"It has the potential to be a catalyst of other development," said David Laube of Noell Consulting about a possible new Chattanooga Lookouts stadium and entertainment venue. "You can make them more than just a ballpark."
The preliminary vision for the 10-square-block district also called for better connecting Howard School with the rest of the area and potentially adding a new middle school.
In addition, an expanded Harris Johnson Park, a potential greenway along Chattanooga Creek, a mix of new housing in Southside Gardens, and improvements to Broad Street and other traffic arteries in the area were among highlights of the plan.
Staff photo by C.B. Schmelter / David Laube, a principal in the Noell Consulting Group, speaks about demographics during the South Broad District planning meeting at Calvary Chapel on Thursday.What's next?
Planners will receive more public input on the preliminary South Broad District blueprint with a target of having a final product at the end of October.
However, the 141-acre foundry property that is now mostly vacant would hold the potential ballpark and undergo vast changes, according to planners.
The ballpark that could replace the existing downtown AT&T Field could serve as a gateway feature to Chattanooga for motorists arriving from Nashville on Interstate 24, planners said.
A slew of possible new developments ranging from housing, commercial space, light industrial uses and a park were pictured springing up around the stadium.
Laube said that, based on what has happened at a half dozen other minor league parks built over the past decade or so around the South, about 1.1 million square feet of new development is projected around a new Chattanooga ballpark.
City Councilman Erskine Oglesby lauded the work done on the plan so far, with a final draft due at the end of October.
"Revitalization needed to start heading south of I-24," he said about the study area that is bounded by the interstate, the former Wheland/U.S. Pipe foundries, Chattanooga Creek and Howard School.
He said there could be a public role in making the plan come to fruition, which the conservative advocacy group Beacon Center of Tennessee has warned is a poor investment for taxpayers.
"We don't want it to drag along," the councilman said. "When everything's approved, I want to start."
Jason Freier, the Lookouts' operating partner, said he liked that a rendering of the potential stadium showed lots of development around it and not just asphalt.
"If you're going to do it, that's the way to do it," he said. "The ballpark has an opportunity to make it a special place."
John Woods, a Lookouts managing partner, has cited a couple of new minor league ballparks with which Freier has been affiliated, in Fort Wayne, Ind., and Columbia, S.C., as having served as catalysts for redevelopment.
Staff photo by C.B. Schmelter / People mingle before the start of the South Broad District planning meeting at Calvary Chapel.The existing Lookouts park, which holds about 6,300 people, was expected to draw between 230,000 and 240,000 people this year. Freier said the Fort Wayne stadium attracted 379,000 people for just baseball its first year, and the park is doing hundreds of other events.
But not everyone was in favor of seeing a new ballpark at the site.
Aubrey Fritz said he worked at Wheland Foundry for 13 years before it was shut down, and he attended Kirkman Technical High School, where AT&T Field now sits near the riverfront. Fritz said he'd like to see a new technical school built at the foundry site to help young people better enter the workforce.
Ann Weeks, a leader in the South Broad Redevelopment Group, didn't take a position on the stadium. But, she said, the planning process and what may come out of it is what the group has been working for over a number of years.
Eric Myers, who directs the Chattanooga Design Studio, said it's too early to place price tags on any of the proposals.
"We're still receiving public input," said Myers, who proposed the study and whose studio is funding the planning initiative and overseeing the efforts of consultants.
Contact Mike Pare at mpare@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6318.