Deep South with a difference: Choo Choo to Chattanooga, Tennessee's quirkiest city

By CHRIS LEADBEATER

A new dawn: The Tennessee River runs through the heart of Chattanooga, and can be spectacular at sunrise


The train at Platform One is late. Seriously behind schedule. And yet it sits there, idle and motionless, power off, seemingly unconcerned about timetables. We are going nowhere.

You might say that this is inexcusable – not least because there is no lack of travellers on Platform One, willing to climb aboard. Nor is there much sign of imminent movement at Platforms Two to Eight, where further would-be passengers wait under the narrow canopies that shelter the walkways from the powerful American sun. But still no-one leaves. No horns toot. No wheels groan into action. No tannoy voice drawls a final call for the 15:31. We are stuck. Static. Abandoned.

Then again, nobody is expecting anything else. For no train has clanked its heavy way out of Chattanooga’s Terminal Station in 40 years. Rail traffic to what was once one of the hubs of the American network – a key stop on the cross-country route from Cincinnati in the north to Atlanta at the heart of the Deep South – had been dwindling throughout the Fifties and Sixties. By the time the last locomotive whistled wearily out of town on August 11th 1970, the end had long been nigh. The Beaux Arts building, a lovely relic of 1909, was closed down and committed to history.


Out of time: The city's railway terminus - once a busy transport hub - has been reinvented as a hotel


And yet history was never likely to keep the station padlocked for long. Glenn Miller had seen to that. Chattanooga Choo Choo – the big-band anthem with which the Iowa-born musician lit up the swing scene – had ensured, in 1941, that Chattanooga would forever be tied to the 20th century’s most glamorous period of travel. ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo, won’t you choo choo me home?’ went its refrain. Two local businessmen thought this a fine idea, and in 1973 the station reopened as a hotel.

Four decades on, the Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel is the city’s most notable attraction. The Victorian carriages on its defunct tracks have been converted into quirky en-suite rooms, including one where I deposit my bags at the beginning of a four-night stay, after checking in at a reception desk in the entrance hall where passengers once bought tickets.


The colourful Choo-Choo heads up the accommodation carriages, where rooms start from £90 a night


But if the link between ‘Chattanooga’ and ‘Choo Choo’ is well known, there is little else that smacks of cliché in a city that does not really do ‘obvious’. In an American state whose stock in trade is places of loud reputation – Memphis, where the Blues echo across Beale Street; Nashville, all cowboy boots and corn-fed country music cheer – Chattanooga is the quiet child. Even its location, pushed into the south-east corner of Tennessee, like an awkward kid at a school disco, suggests something different

Not that Chattanooga is anything but a city of The South. So much becomes clear during the first two days of my stay. Its southernness is on the wall of Porkers Bar-B-Que, on the main drag of Market Street, where a photo of George W Bush – glad-handing staff during a breakfast visit in 2007 – hangs marooned in the Obama era. It is there in blonder form amid the syrupy ribs of Sticky Fingers on Broad Street – where the day Texas starlet Jessica Simpson popped in is framed by the loos.



Swing thing: The phrase 'choo-choo' has been an emblem of the city since Glenn Miller eulogised it in song


But for all this, Chattanooga seems to keep its own counsel. There is no musical fanfare, no Elvis palace. Nor is there much industrial sweat. Not any more. On this matter, Chattanooga is a phoenix. At the end of the 19th century, it was a workhorse of factories and forges – whose growth spurt had been engineered by its position on the rail network. But expansion came at a price. In 1969, the US government declared the city to have the dirtiest air in the whole country. As the Seventies dawned, Chattanooga was not a dot on the map where tourists – even curious road-trippers – would halt.

That, in 2010, Chattanooga has become of rather more interest to visitors, is thanks to a dramatic revival that has occurred over the last 40 years – a leap from the canvas fuelled by significant investment in the city’s infrastructure and appearance. Workhorse has turned show pony.


Back from the brink: The Bluff View Art District offers high culture from its lofty position above the river


This makeover plays out in the Bluff View Art District – a lofty area on the banks of the Tennessee River that has long observed the city’s ebbing fortunes from its rocky crag. During the railroad era, it was a desirable enclave where the captains of commerce built their elegant homes. But as Chattanooga rose and fell, so did the District. By the Eighties, its houses were in disrepair – and stranded next to a rubbish dump that had become the area’s key reason for existence.

Its sloping streets are now busy with galleries, museums, coffee shops and restaurants – a pocket of culture and an emblem of the new Chattanooga. Certainly, it is hard to picture the city of 1969 as I approach the Hunter Museum Of American Art, an institution, cocooned inside a 1904 Edwardian mansion, that showcases Stateside art from colonial times onwards – works by Andy Warhol, John Singer Sargent, Edward Hopper (www.huntermuseum.org) – while stood 80ft above the Tennessee.

The river is the city’s lifeblood, as crucial a part of its renaissance as it was central to the past – when its currents powered the hyperactive mills of Chattanooga’s industrial youth. Nowadays it moves smooth and clean – and with definite beauty where it passes through the Tennessee River Gorge, a 26-mile canyon that it dissects on its way to Alabama. On the morning I visit, nothing disturbs the scene beyond the whirr of the catamaran (run by Tennessee Aquarium, the city’s impressive marine life centre – www.tnaqua.org) that has transported me downstream. The surface of the river glides, Bald Eagles wheel overhead, and, on the bank, men dangle fishing rods on the porches of tiny huts.


Splash and dash: The river is a hive of activity, and regularly plays host to morning kayakers


And yet, much of the traffic on the Tennessee is propelled by muscle rather than motor. Every November, it plays host to the Head Of The Hooch, America’s second biggest rowing regatta (so named because it was formerly held on the Chattahoochee River in Atlanta) – a major event for the college system that, for one weekend, transforms the city into a chattering party zone.

My own progress on the Tennessee is gentler. On my third morning, I take to the water in a kayak for a foray around MacLellan Island, a nugget of land in the middle of the river. It is the start of a day that will also see me cycle the River Walk, a 12-mile trail that cuts along the south bank, as well as inch up the Walnut Street Bridge, a 19th century structure where one of the limestone supports has been converted into a climbing wall. But the highlight is that first hour, paddle in hand, mist throwing haze at the sunrise. In such light, it is easy to forget that this is a lengthy waterway, a 652-mile snake that curls into Alabama and Kentucky, as well as Tennessee, before pouring into the River Ohio.


Hands on: Point Park has a Civil War memorial that shows Union and Confederate soldiers shaking hands


But rewind 150 years, and the picture was not so calm. Chattanooga’s strategic riverside location made it a place to be fought over in the brutal tussle of the US Civil War. In 1863, the city witnessed The Battle Above The Clouds, an arduous slog, fought in dank November fog on the steep slopes of Lookout Mountain – a slab of rock, more ridge than peak (long and wide, it spreads across the borders into both Georgia and Alabama) that rears its head to 2392ft, just south-west of the city.

The result, a surprise Union win, proved crucial in the war overall, so much so that some of the battlefield is protected as Chickamauga And Chattanooga National Military Park (www.nps.gov/chch) – including one section, Point Park, where canons still thrust barrels at the city. Unusually, this leafy enclosure contains a joint Confederate-Union memorial, two soldiers, one from each side, shaking hands atop a large column. This is a rarity – a conciliatory monument to a conflict that, even in 2010, can be divisive. Viewed on a blowy day, the wind shaking the trees around it, it is a touching sight.


Hold tight: Lookout Mountain Incline Railway hits a gradient of 72 per cent en route to the top of the bluff


Nowadays, the mountain is one the city’s playgrounds. Ruby Falls (www.rubyfalls.com) is a network of caves, chiefly of interest for the 145-foot waterfall that tumbles within. Lookout Mountain Incline Railway (www.ridetheincline.com), meanwhile, is a miracle of 19th century engineering, a mile of track that clings, spider-like, to the sheer flank of this giant boulder. For a few seconds, where the gradient hits a dizzying 72.7 per cent, I’m half convinced that I’m riding a 21st century rollercoaster rather than a piece of history that opened in 1895 (and remains the world’s steepest passenger railway).

However, the clarion call comes from Rock City (www.ridetheincline.com), a ‘fairytale garden’ that lurks over the state line on the Georgia side of the mountain. There is nothing overly special about its ‘hidden’ dells and groves, but there is much to be said for Lover’s Leap, a cliff from which you can – a placard boasts – supposedly see seven states. This is optimistic – realistically, Kentucky, Virginia and the Carolinas are beyond the horizon, even if Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee are not.

But what you can see, as Chattanooga nestles below, is a Tennessee city with an identity of its own.

‘Chattanooga Choo Choo, won’t you choo choo me home?’ Glenn Miller was on to something...



Optimistic: The claim that you can see seven states from Rock City is over-cooked - but the view is fabulous


Travel facts
Delta (0871 221 1222, www.delta.com) flies to Atlanta (80 miles south of Chattanooga) once daily, from London Gatwick. Prices from £400 return.

Standard double rooms at the Chattanooga Choo Choo hotel (001-423-266-5000, www.choochoo.com) start from $123 (£90) per night. Converted railway carriages (which sleep two) cost from $211 (£155) per night.

America As You Like It (020 8742 8299, www.americaasyoulikeit.com) offers a five-night package to Chattanooga, including return flights on US Airways from Gatwick via Charlotte to Chattanooga, five days' car hire and five nights (room only) at the Holiday Inn Choo Choo - from £685 per person.

Kayaking, climbing and cycling in Chattanooga can be arranged through Outdoor Chattanooga (001-423-643-6888, www.outdoorchattanooga.com).

For more information on Chattanooga, see www.chattanoogafun.com. For more on Tennessee and the Deep South region, see www.deep-south-usa.com.


source: dailymail