Alton Park

Hello to all and thanks for the invite.

My cousins own a salvage yard/repair shop for European vehicles over on Workman Road (formerly Hamill Road) in Alton Park. The shop operates in the guts of a monolithic, abandoned textile mill from some minor industrial heyday of Chattanooga's adolescence.

I used the setting and the cousins for a digital video project in graduate school. My focus-- if in fact I managed any during grad school --was the relationship between my older cousin and his son, and I was never really satisfied with it, swore I'd try to make it again some day, yada yada yada.

What is relevant to our discussion here is the sense of rebirth, or at least recycling, of these stalwart old buildings that live in the forgotten communities of the valley--and I believe this is a much different thing than the commercial clamor of urban renewal and historical preservation.

The beauty and memory of these places are worth examining as we try to tell Chattanooga's stories.