“Surprising Chattanooga serves art lovers, adventurers and everyone in between”

Surprising Chattanooga serves art lovers, adventurers and everyone in between

Posted: 10 Jul 2010 09:45 PM PDT

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Jason Lea/JLea@News-Herald.com At the Bluff View Art District in Chattanooga, the culinary arts are treated with the same respect as sculpture and portraiture.

Jason Lea/JLea@News-Herald.com Ruby Falls is ensconced, but no longer hidden, inside Lookout Mountain. One must walk through a half-mile of caves before coming to the 140-foot waterfall.

Jason Lea/JLea@News-Herald.com Christopher Mosey, an artist who lives and works in Chattanooga, blows into the glass he just pulled from a furnace.

Jason Lea/JLea@News-Herald.com The Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga has an exhibit, Jellies: Living Art, which pairs jellyfish with blown glass and ceramic facsimiles. This is one of the living models.

By Jason Lea
JLea@News-Herald.com

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Jason Lea/JLea@News-Herald.com The local art scene has revitalized Chattanooga's Main Street. This building was abandoned until it was transformed into a piece of immersive art.

Chattanooga and Cleveland are not so different.

Both thrived on manufacturing for decades. For Cleveland, it was steel. The Tennessee city bottled Coca-Cola.

It helped that both cities were transportation hubs. Cleveland had access to the Great Lakes and Cuyahoga River. Chattanooga had the Tennessee River, the Ohio River's biggest tributary, and the railroad.

Then, both cities suffered an embarrassment that signaled a change in their trajectory. The Cuyahoga River ignited in 1969. The same year, Walter Cronkite announced that Chattanooga was the country's dirtiest city.

Since then, the manufacturing industry tapered, and both cities have worked to replace that hole in their economy and regain their reputation.

A Chattanooga visit highlighted just how far the city has come in its personal renaissance in a short period of time.

Art districts, restaurants and breweries have replaced what were empty buildings and abandoned blocks just a few years ago.

The city's resuscitation began with the 1992 opening of the Chattanooga Aquarium.

Before the aquarium, Chattanoogans had no linchpin to draw people to their city. At most, it was a day's stop on the way to Atlanta or Orlando, Fla. But the aquarium gave the city a rallying point.

This sounds like hyperbole if you haven't seen the aquarium — way more than a few tanks with fish and a shallow pool where you can feed the stingrays.

The aquarium stretches across two buildings with freshwater habitats recreating rivers from around the world, botanical and butterfly gardens, art exhibits and an iMax theater. Its ocean habitats have sharks and an enormous green sea turtle named Oscar because he was covered in green algae when naturalists found him. There's also a riverboat cruise.

Find 14-foot Beluga sturgeons, hyacinth macaws (the world's largest parrots), polka-dot- and orange-paisley-patterned freshwater stingrays, sand tiger and brownbanded bamboo sharks, penguins, otters, alligators, anacondas and pig-nosed turtles.

And, yes, a pool where you can feed the stingrays.

Art meets sea life in "Jellies-Living Art," a beautiful exhibit pairing live jellyfish with blown-glass and ceramic pieces of art inspired by them.

Art for all

An art exhibit in the aquarium might seem out of place in other cities, but it makes sense in Chattanooga.

The city has made a commitment to integrating art into as many of its facets as possible. Abandoned buildings have been converted into immersive art, historic neighborhoods have been reinvented with free sculpture gardens and locally made artworks punctuate sidewalks along Main Street.

The transformation has taken place in the last four years.

In 2006, Chattanooga began the Arts Move program, which helps fund artists' relocation to the city. So far 27 artists have relocated there since then, including sculptors, writers and dulcimer players.

The core of the art community stretches along the city's Main Street, where one can meander among a woodworker, photographer, blacksmith and glass blower all within a single block.

Christopher Mosey is a glass artist who moved to Chattanooga in 2001, before the Arts Move program. He has had the benefit of watching the art community explode around him. It is not unusual for Matt Sears, the woodworker down the street, or other artists to visit his studio. While there, they talk craft, business or shoot the breeze.

"It's a very nurturing atmosphere," Mosey said. "It's like being in school. That's the way it was back then. You feed off each others' suggestions and criticisms."

Of course, the city that headhunts artists has an art museum. The Hunter Museum of American Art is perched near a 90-foot bluff overlooking the Tennessee River and displays the work of American artists from the colonial period to the present.

Works from famous artists such as Mary Cassatt, Roy Lichtenstein, Thomas Cole, Andy Warhol and Samuel F.B. Morse — yes, the man who invented the telegraph — adorn the galleries.

The museum often hosts special exhibitions emphasizing local art. For instance, Tennessee's folk heritage is the frame for a photography exhibit from Sept. 16 to Dec. 5; and, from Nov. 4 to Jan. 16, the museum will invite select local and regional artists to display their work during the second Hunter Invitational.

The Bluff View Art District is within walking distance of the museum. Admission is free to that historical district, with its a sculpture garden and gallery, and many of the pieces are for sale. Consequently, the sculptures and paintings in the gallery and garden, aside from a few permanent installations, often change.

The art district resembles the cities of Europe in the humble way it integrates art into the entire block. An unobtrusive sculpture of a man and his granddaughter sits outside the Bluff View's chocolate kitchen.

A small sign on the wall outside the kitchen reminds visitors that the chocolatier is also a "working artist." The culinary arts are on full display in Bluff View with restaurants, a coffee house and bakery.

Chasing waterfalls

Chattanooga certainly has its share of natural beauty.

Ruby Falls is sequestered by a half-mile of underground caverns and about 1,100 feet beneath Lookout Mountain.

The man who discovered it, Leo Lambert, had to crawl on his stomach for hours before he found the 140-foot waterfall. While the trip is easier on visitors now, the view is no less spectacular.

The dripping water has shaped the limestone walls of the cave into unusual formations with colorful names like The Dragon's Foot and the Southward End of a Donkey Traveling North. Streaks of red, white and black come from iron oxide, calcium carbonate and manganese, respectively.

Visitors can tour Ruby Falls by flashlight or when the cave is lit by LED lights. The two experiences are very different. It's almost impossible to photograph any of the unusual rock formations or the falls by flashlight, but the near darkness preserves the caverns' mystique.

Rock City Gardens, also on Lookout Mountain, are across the state line in Georgia.

The gardens balance botany, caverns, a beautiful view and — guess the disparate element — fairy tales. A nature lover will enjoy the gardens, forest and view from the bluffs. (They claim you can see seven states on a clear day.) But children are the ones who will appreciate Rock City the most.

Frieda Carter, the first curator of Rock City Gardens, loved folk and fairy tales. She hired Jessie Sanders, a sculptor from Atlanta, to build dioramas that depict the stories of Rip Van Winkle, Goldilocks, Humpty Dumpty and others. But Carter did not put the fairies in her garden. She cloistered them in a long cavern, so visitors would be removed from the outside world and transported to a land of fairy tales.

It sounds kitschy, and, frankly, it is. But kids will love it, and so will adults if they let themselves.

Nature's beauty is not limited to the rocks. The Tennessee River gives a pretty and different perspective to the city.

Visitors can see the river from a kayak or the aquarium's catamaran, River Gorge Explorer. In addition to getting a different view of the art museum and Bluff View Art District, boaters will also pass an Audubon island hosting several local species of birds. The most impressive native is the Great Blue Heron with its 6-foot wingspan and azure crest.

For the thrill of it

Adrenaline addicts are well-served by Chattanooga.

Visitors wishing to raft the same course as 1996 Olympians must drive 45 minutes to the Ocoee River.

The Ocoee has class-four rapids, and because the water is controlled by dams, you never have to worry about low water.

Guides divide the river into two sections, the upper and middle Ocoee. Rafting just the middle Ocoee is an exciting and extremely soggy way to spend four hours. If you also want to raft the upper Ocoee, plan for a full-day excursion.

Those who would rather get high than wet can try Chattanooga's high-altitude pastimes. No experience is necessary for a tandem hang glide in Lookout Mountain Flight Park. Experienced hang gliders take you as high as 2,000 feet on a flight lasting 12 to 20 minutes.

Those who want to stay a bit closer to the ground can enjoy the aerial obstacle course at Ruby Falls, traveling from tree to tree on a series of wires, ladders and zip lines. It's completely safe, but it doesn't feel that way from 30 feet up.

Chattanooga's recent changes are many. One year ago, there was no aerial obstacle course. Five years ago, there was no Arts Move program or Main Street revitalization. Fewer than 20 years ago, there was no aquarium or Bluff View Arts District.

If you know Chattanooga only as the country's onetime dirtiest city, as a Civil War site or from the song "Chattanooga Choo-Choo," then you don't know it at all. So come and get acquainted.

Traveler's Checks

One can fly USAirways from Cleveland to Chattanooga with a stopover in Charlotte, N.C.

Details: Chattanooga's Visitor Bureau: www.chattanoogafun.com

Tennessee Aquarium: www.tnaaqua.org; 800-262-0695.

Chattanooga's art scene and the Arts Move program: www.artsmove.org.

Hunter Museum of American Art: www.huntermuseum.org; 423-267-0968.

Ruby Falls: www.rubyfalls.com; 423-821-2544.

Rock City Gardens: www.seerockcity.com; 800-854-0675.

Rafting on the Ocoee River: www.cherokeerafting.com; 800-451-RAFT.

Hang gliding: www.hanglide.com; 877-426-4543.