A small child stands in front of a towering two-story house on the west side in 1955. Photo by Pat St. Charles, Jr., contributed by ChattanoogaHistory.com.A newly discovered batch of historic photos shows the once-proud homes of Cameron Hill before the west-side neighborhood was flattened by progress in the late 1950s.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Cameron Hill was one of the toniest addresses in Chattanooga, a bastion of high society populated in large part by transplanted Northern families after the Civil War.
By the late 1950s, though, it was crumbling. It was subsequently wiped away to make way for urban renewal and highway construction here in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
What happened? Well, two world wars and the Great Depression put urban progress on pause in the first half of the 20th century.
By the 1950s about 70 percent of the houses in Cameron Hill, many of them built during the Victorian era, had been deemed sub-standard, and some were literally caving in.