First in a series on changing cities

When Pat Kelley was growing up in the 1960s, Chattanooga was still a bustling industrial town. Textile factories, chemical plants, and steam boiler manufacturers employed men and women by the thousands. As a boy, Kelley caught glimpses of fire flashing in the foundries and watched as steel mills hurled atomized carbon into the humid Southern air.

The Western and Atlantic Railroad first put Chattanooga on the map in 1850, ultimately fueling a post–Civil War economic boom that turned the sleepy Tennessee town into a manufacturing powerhouse and transportation hub. “The Dynamo of Dixie” reached its commercial peak in the early 1960s, but with prosperity came pollution.

“The story went that [when] men wore white shirts to work downtown, between the foundries and the industries, they would go home and their shirts would be blackened,” Kelley said. “There was a lot of smoke.”

Making matters worse, the surrounding mountains trapped the growing smog under a lid of warm air—a phenomenon known as “atmospheric inversion.” In 1969, a federal air quality report declared Chattanooga the most polluted city in the United States. In the 1970s new EPA regulations, economic downturn, and foreign competition wreaked havoc on industrial towns across America: Chattanooga was not spared.

“There was no growth,” Kelley said. “The industrial market that was there, all of a sudden wasn’t.”

After graduating high school, he moved to Knoxville to study engineering at the University of Tennessee, returning to his hometown in 1975 to take a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Even in a bum economy, nuclear power plants need engineers. From his downtown office, Kelley watched the city die: “From Fourth Street down to the [Tennessee] River was just decrepit no man’s land.”

One by one, factories closed, passenger trains stopped, and foundries fell silent. Blue-collar jobs disappeared and the jobless fled toward brighter horizons. The interstate highway redirected traffic (and the business it brought) away from downtown. Warehouses, once full of goods and bustling with activity, emptied—their bare skeletons remained behind as towering testaments to a bygone era. “The Dynamo of Dixie” deteriorated to a 20th-century environmental and economic wasteland.

In the 1980s, though, Chattanooga began reinventing itself: It is now home to a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem of tech startups, logistics hubs, and small businesses of all kinds. A 2017 American Lung Association report declared the city’s air quality, once the worst in America, to be among the best in the country, and Chattanooga has earned a reputation as an outdoor adventure mecca.

Formerly crumbling neighborhoods are filled with the sounds of construction and moving trucks as businesses and people flock in, drawn by the low cost of living and high quality of life—yet in this city of 179,000, many Chattanoogans are still in poverty.

CHATTANOOGA’S STORY OF REBIRTH began in the early ’80s when civic leaders, philanthropic foundations, and nonprofits launched initiatives aimed at reimagining what Chattanooga could be. An alphabet soup of projects and partnerships organized conversations with the community, drew up plans and proposals, and sent civic leaders across the country to study other struggling cities that had turned themselves around.

River City Company, an economic development nonprofit born from those dialogues and dreams, spearheaded a long-term city revitalization program centered around downtown and the waterfront. River City built and opened in 1992 the Tennessee Aquarium on the banks of the river, the same area Kelley described as a “no man’s land.” The aquarium attracted tourists, changed the city’s image, and kicked off Chattanooga’s renaissance.

For the next two decades, the city’s public-private alliance continued to craft public spaces, building parks, plazas, apartments, and theaters. As the downtown area transformed, people moved back and businesses revived. Artists painted murals and installed other public artworks, bringing character and color to previously drab buildings and streets, celebrating local history, and “rebranding” struggling neighborhoods to stimulate economic growth. Increasingly, the city was a destination, rather than a place to avoid or escape.

Yet, even as the city developed, some continued to suffer.