The Bette Davis Eyes sculpture by John Henry at Sculpture Fields at Montague Park in Chattanooga, Tenn., Jan. 25, 2016. Despite some transformative growing pains, Chattanooga may well be one of the most pleasant and livable ones in the United States. (Jada Yuan/The New York Times)Last month, The New York Times ranked Chattanooga as No. 25 on its 52 Places To Go list, and now its newly named 52 Places correspondent, Jada Yuan, who will be traveling to each place on the list, has completed her visit here. Here are her impressions. Her next dispatch will be from Montgomery, Ala. Follow her on Instagram @alphajada.
“You’ve arrived! GIG CITY: Home of the Nation’s Fastest Internet” is the rather unsexy city slogan greeting visitors upon their arrival at the tiny airport in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “Gig” refers to the status that Chatt (or Cha or the Nooga, depending on whom you ask) earned in 2010 as the first municipality in the United States to offer 1 gigabyte fiber-optic internet speed to its citizens and 10 gigabytes to businesses that will pay premium prices. That clunky claim to fame has lured many a startup to the Innovation District in its revitalized downtown. It was also a major factor in earning the city the No. 25 spot on the 52 Places To Go in 2018 list (I’m visiting every destination this year), even if it doesn’t quite sing on a postcard.
When a city’s major selling points are its internet speed and its wood-fired choo-choo train (a phenomenon in 1880), plus a couple of new hotels, it’s hard to imagine what its character might be. With a midsize population of about 117,000, Chattanooga sits right across the Tennessee border from Georgia, so close that one easily crosses state lines driving around – though the Confederate flags I saw flying high seemed to be concentrated on the Georgia side. Alabama and North Carolina aren’t far, either.
“It’s hard not to feel like you’re on the margins when you live in a market like this,” said Tim Kelly, a local business mogul and chairman of the city’s popular amateur soccer club, which has drawn as many as 18,000 spectators a game. Atlanta, he explained, is a constant brain drain, and Nashville, as the state capital, gets the bulk of the government’s attention and funding. “We’re a little insecure about our sense of place, but I think that makes us that much more intense about it when we find it. Localism and local consciousness are really strong.”
The Dome Building in Chattanooga, Tenn., Jan. 25, 2016. Despite some transformative growing pains, Chattanooga may well be one of the most pleasant and livable ones in the United States. (Jada Yuan/The New York Times)What I found over a five-day stay may well be one of the most pleasant and livable cities in the United States. (That is, once the freezing late-January winds that threatened to blow my car off the road had died down. “I wish you were here in the summer! You’re missing everything!” was a refrain I heard about 15 times a day.) Because Chattanooga is nestled into the ridge-and-valley portion of the Appalachian Mountains and oriented around the Tennessee River, the outdoors – in particular hang gliding, mountain biking, hiking, rock climbing, paddle boarding and kayaking – seem to be a way of life. Locals joke that Chacos, those hiking sandals that strap to your feet, are the city’s official shoe. In winter, people just wear them with socks. I, of course, bought a pair.