I grew up on the prairie – a section of northeastern Colorado considered one of the most arid places on earth. It’s no exaggeration to say I didn’t see a body of water until I was an adolescent. Where I’m from, water was something you dug out of a well, held onto, used sparingly and often prepared to go without.
Today, I live in the Hill City neighborhood of Chattanooga. Every day, I get to cross the Market Street Bridge, the Walnut Street Bridge or both, and when I do I try to stop and look at the river – really look at it. Asking someone like me to contemplate that much water in one place at one time is like asking a dog to understand algebra: I can marvel at it, but I can’t say I quite get it.
Some mornings, the river is choppy and swirly. Some mornings, it’s still. It’s always large and on the move. Its immensity and power are beautifully crushing to behold.
During Dalton Roberts’ 16 years (!) as our county’s chief executive, he understood how water moved and nourished people in every sense. Jack Lupton, Mai Bell Hurley, Stroud Watson and many others deserve their flowers for seeing downtown’s dormant potential in the 1970s and 80s and doing something about it. Dalton knew downtown’s importance, of course, but he wanted people to follow the river up toward the direction of his childhood home, toward the Chickamauga Dam and the Highway 58 community known as Watering Trough.
Today, a 16-mile linear park that bears his name allows us to do just that.
The mayor’s genius is evident not only in the scale of his vision but also in the precision of the project’s details. Nowadays, I visit the Tennessee Riverpark mostly with my mother, who suffers from a degenerative disease that keeps her in a wheelchair. The Riverpark – so lovely, so accessible, so fully available to people in her situation – is rare and wonderful in its simplicity: smoothly paved, guided by a small wrought iron fence, marked with pieces of public art, bike share stations and shaded picnic areas.
The safety you feel at Riverpark is not the product of police presence – it’s in the presence of others, everyone else who’s coming close to the water’s edge for the same unfathomable reasons as you. Perhaps that’s why when we walk along the river, almost every single person will make eye contact, smile and say hello.
Part of a mayor’s job is fiscal and administrative – but only a part of it. The mayor must also foster stability and civility among people. Mayor Roberts knew that Chattanooga would be home to many, many people, and they’d all want a place to be free. We don’t build paths and parks because we know how everyone will eventually use them. We build them because we have no idea.
It’s easy to take Chattanooga’s many wonderful public spaces for granted; I suppose that’s the point. On my first day of work at the City of Chattanooga, Mayor Andy Berke attended a ceremony to dedicate a new mural in Milliken Park in the Piney Woods neighborhood. I could have written this column about that or about the reimagining of Miller Park or Patten Parkway in the heart of downtown or the new Avondale Center in East Chattanooga.
Is it right to call these places gifts to the public? Not exactly. After all, we do buy them with our tax dollars.
Better perhaps to think of these places as wells or troughs, not of water, but of something just as essential. I don’t know how much time I have left with my mom, but I know it’s not an infinite supply. Moments we spend with people we love are indeed unrecoverable. The river, on the other hand, and the feeling we get being near it – these are gifts that renew themselves as they renew us. The more we receive, the more we’re allowed to enjoy.
The Riverpark might be named in Mayor Roberts’ honor because it arguably would not have existed without him. Yet it belongs to us. You become a member of our public simply by setting foot here, breathing deep and allowing yourself to be awed by the water and everyone else gathered at its edge with you. These are gifts we give to each other.
“My Favorite Thing” is a regular feature in which Chattanoogans from all walks of life write about the one thing they enjoy the most in the Scenic City. Installments unearth hidden gems, offer fresh perspectives of local mainstays and reveal the rich diversity of Chattanooga.
Kerry Hayes is the former chief of staff to the Chattanooga mayor’s office and the founder and principal of Coeo Strategies, a boutique consulting communications and advisory firm. A native of Colorado, he has been a Chattanoogan since 2017 and moved his mom here in 2023.