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The Tennessee River is no small waterway, being close to a quarter mile wide as it courses its way through Chattanooga. The city’s paved Riverwalk stretches for more than 13 miles, providing soaring views of the river from high bluffs as well as descending to come into intimate contact with the rolling water.
Photo Above: The Market Street Bridge and downtown Chattanooga reflect on a calm-surfaced Tennessee River.
We were on our way home from a trip farther south when we made an impromptu decision to spend a couple of hours exploring the trail’s passage through the downtown area.
It was early on a Sunday morning, so the Hunter Museum of American Art was closed, but the outdoor sculpture garden is always open. Two works in particular caught my eye: Deborah Butterfield’s bronze horse that looks like it was created with pieces of driftwood and John Dreyfuss’s multiple statues that make up a nostalgic scene from a baseball game.
The Riverwalk made an absolutely unnecessarily, but-oh-so-much-fun-to-walk zigzagging pathway down the hill from the museum to several large cabin cruisers docked along Ross’s Landing at river’s edge. Striking up a conversation, I found that they were traveling together on a journey that was taking them from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Chattanooga and the Tennessee River were just a side trip for them.
Chattanooga has spent more than $200 million in the last few years revitalizing its downtown Riverpark and this investment is most apparent in the area around the Tennessee Aquarium. Although it was still too early for the attraction to be open, numerous families were already wandering around the plaza, with children playing in the cascades of the staircase waterfall.
The Walnut Street Bridge across the river is billed as “one of the largest pedestrian bridges in the world” and is an attraction on its own. It took us across the river to wander along the northern shore. Multiple paved pathways go through Coolidge Park, passing by an indoor carousel and interactive water fountain before leading to Renaissance Park. It’s a 23-acre green space that was once an area polluted by now-removed manufacturing plants. Here we watched a huge snapping turtle surface from the depths of a small lagoon before retracing steps back to our car.
