For nearly 140 years, the Car Barn stood as a steadfast fixture through generations of change in Chattanooga. Built in 1886, it served as a storage and repair facility for Chattanooga’s public transportation system for nearly a century, including both horse-drawn and electric streetcars. In the early 1980s, it was reborn as the Sportsbarn Athletic Club.
From its sprawling footprint to its red-brick facade, the Car Barn was a storyteller in mortar and clay – a silent witness to the changing city around it. Its walls seemed to radiate history to the passersby on their way to the Tennessee Aquarium or the Riverwalk.
Now, that history is being reduced to rubble to clear the way for a Drury hotel.
Jumbled heaps of twisted steel, cracked concrete and red brick – taller than the workers in neon yellow shirts who move between them – cover the foundation. Once the building’s base, the foundation now performs a grim final duty: serving as a parking spot for a long, deep dumpster that vanishes into the crumbling interior.
The irreversible process of unmaking has begun.
On the Market Street side, mechanical beasts of steel and hydraulics take massive bites from the structure, spilling its walls onto the ground. Like accelerated entropy, the jagged wreckage creeps toward Broad Street, where the final blow will land and a small but meaningful chapter of Chattanooga’s past will disappear into one last dumpster.
The Car Barn never sought to dazzle. It didn’t rise with the crystalline geometry of the Tennessee Aquarium, with its angular glass roof juts skyward like a modern sculpture. It lacked the panoramic sweep of the BlueCross BlueShield headquarters, perched like a monument to progress atop Cameron Hill.
Nor did it boast the architectural flourishes of its elder peers – the James Building’s Neoclassical grandeur or the Dome Building’s shining copper crown. Instead, the Car Barn was built with local hands and humble materials, its red brick laid with purpose, not pretense.
And yet, says Todd Morgan, executive director of Preserve Chattanooga, its loss matters.
“When this building goes,” he adds, “a piece of the city’s memory will go with it.”
The Car Barn’s legacy
Before it became the Sportsbarn – before ellipticals lined the floor and weights clanked on rubber mats – the Car Barn served a more industrial rhythm. Built for Chattanooga’s public transportation system, it functioned for decades as a storage and repair facility for streetcars, later evolving into a refueling station for city buses. It wasn’t designed to turn heads, it was designed to do a job, Morgan says.
“It operated in continuous service for public transportation into the early 1980s. It was always a working building – and that’s what makes it significant. It speaks to the way the city once moved.”
When its days as a transit facility ended, the building didn’t fall into disuse. Instead, it was reimagined. Its strong, utilitarian bones made it ideal for reuse, and it was transformed into the Sportsbarn Athletic Club – a noble second act that preserved its physical integrity even as its purpose shifted.
“Even when it changed uses, the character of the building stayed intact,” Morgan says. “You could walk past it and still feel that it belonged to another time.”
Now, as excavators chew through its frame and bricks fall into steel containers, that story risks ending mid-sentence – not because the Car Barn lost relevance, but because its usefulness was misunderstood.
“When there’s a story behind these historic buildings, they anchor us in our community,” says Morgan. “This one told a story about how Chattanooga worked. It told a story about movement, change and adaptation.”
Preserve Chattanooga’s efforts
Morgan has walked this road before. As the executive director of Preserve Chattanooga, and formerly of Knox Heritage in Knoxville, he’s spent years navigating the narrow space between history and progress – between preservation and the forces that often erase it.
“Unfortunately, it takes either a serious threat of losing a place or actually losing a place, to galvanize a community behind what we do,” Morgan says.
That’s what brought Preserve Chattanooga to the Car Barn – not in protest, but in conversation. More than two years before demolition began, the organization reached out to Drury Hotels, the Missouri-based company planning to build a new hotel on the site.
The ask was modest: preserve the building’s Market and Broad Street facades and incorporate them into the design. No one was asking to halt development. No one was demanding the building be kept whole.
“At no point did we say, ‘You can’t touch this building,’” Morgan says. “We said, ‘Let’s work together to do something that respects the history while allowing the new project to move forward.’”
But the request was met with silence. Drury never responded to the proposal and declined to meet, Morgan says. As excavators moved in and bricks began to fall, the opportunity to compromise – to creatively blend old and new – vanished.
Preserve Chattanooga has been trying to interrupt that cycle for 50 years. Founded in 1975 under the name Landmarks Chattanooga – and later known as Cornerstones – the organization formed out of the same grassroots urgency that often sparks preservation movements: the fear that something important was about to be lost.
Since then, it has protected landmarks like Terminal Station and the Dome Building through easements, education and advocacy. Today, it remains the city’s only nonprofit devoted entirely to historic preservation.
“We focus on being the preservation resource for Chattanooga,” Morgan says. “We do advocacy, we help with financing tools like federal tax credits, and we work to keep history alive – not just for the sake of the past, but for the identity of neighborhoods, for the economy, for tourism. These buildings matter.”
Why buildings matter
In a city known for reinventing itself – from rail hub to riverfront attraction, from manufacturing town to outdoor haven – it’s easy to believe that progress and preservation are opposing forces. But Morgan insists they don’t have to be.
“Just because a place is old doesn’t mean it’s insignificant,” he says.
The Car Barn was part of a National Register of Historic Places district that included neighboring buildings to the north. That designation, Morgan explains, isn’t simply a badge of honor – it’s a carefully vetted recognition of historic, architectural or cultural significance. But contrary to popular belief, being listed on the National Register offers no guaranteed protection from demolition, especially if a property lacks a local historic designation or preservation easement.
“This is still America, where property rights rule,” Morgan says. “But communities do have a right – and a responsibility – to say, ‘We value these things, and we want to work with you to preserve them.’ That’s been upheld in courts time and time again.”
Heritage, Morgan continues, isn’t just about nostalgia. Studies show that cultural tourists – people who seek out historic sites, museums and architecture – stay longer and spend more money than the average traveler. In a city like Chattanooga, where tourism plays a vital role in the economy, protecting historic buildings isn’t just sentiment; it’s good business.
The new Drury Plaza Hotel will bring rooms, revenue and foot traffic – all valid contributions to downtown growth. But, Morgan argues, it could have offered more: context, meaning, a story rooted in place.
“We want visitors to learn and engage with this place, not just sleep in a hotel and leave. What if you walked into that new hotel and saw a timeline of Chattanooga’s transportation history? What if the design incorporated the original brick, and the story of the Car Barn became part of the guest experience?”
That vision never materialized. But the idea speaks to a broader principle: that place matters. That buildings can be more than shelter; they can be vessels for memory and identity. And, Morgan says, that the cumulative loss of these places reshapes the story a city tells about itself.
“Piece by piece, we lose another part of the fabric. And then one day you look around and ask, ‘What happened to the city?’”
Case studies in adaptive reuse
If the Car Barn’s story feels like a missed opportunity, it’s only because Chattanooga has shown that another path is possible.
“There are plenty of examples right here in town where developers made it work,” Morgan says. “They figured out how to bring these historic buildings back to life in a way that makes financial sense and preserves the character of the city.”
One of the most visible examples rises just a few blocks away: the Chattanooga Savings Bank building, now being reborn as The Waymark – a Tapestry Collection by Hilton. For years, the building sat empty, a historic fixture in downtown with no clear future. But when the right developer came along, the possibilities came into focus.
The restoration involves recreating original plaster moldings, cleaning and refinishing brass details, and preserving the historic elevator lobby along with other architectural features from the building’s early days.
Such painstaking restoration wouldn’t have been possible without critical financial support.
“They were able to obtain federal rehabilitation tax credits and a state grant because of the building’s status on the National Register,” Morgan explains. “It shows that you can take historic properties and do something wonderful with them. You can keep your architecture and history.”
The $59 million transformation not only preserved the building’s historic character, it also turned a long-dormant space into an active economic contributor. Guests will soon occupy rooms. Light will soon return to windows long dark. In this case, history was not an obstacle but an asset.
A few blocks in the other direction, another success story unfolded at Common House. Once a shuttered YMCA, the structure now houses a private club with coworking spaces, a restaurant, event venues and boutique lodging – all carefully wrapped within the preserved contours of its original design.
“I used to drive by the building and think, ‘This is gorgeous. It’s sad that it’s just sitting there, falling apart,’” Morgan recalls. “Now it’s vibrant. They kept so many of the interior details that made the place special.”
These are not isolated examples. From Warehouse Row to Signal Mill, Chattanooga has demonstrated what can happen when developers embrace adaptive reuse – the practice of giving old buildings new purpose. Whether it’s an old knitting mill turned into lofts or a hospital turned into senior living, the formula is well-established: retain what’s meaningful, update what’s necessary and make it work.
“There are developers who know how to do this,” Morgan says. “They know how to pencil it out, how to use facade easements, tax credits, local incentives. And they’ll tell you – the buildings that have history, that have memory – those are often more desirable in the end. They have character you can’t replicate.”
The bigger picture
As bricks fall from the Car Barn and Chattanooga watches another piece of its architectural past disappear, Morgan is already thinking ahead to what could still be saved.
“This isn’t about one building,” he says. “It’s about how we think as a city. What do we value? What do we want to keep?”
Despite Chattanooga’s rich architectural inventory – including dozens of properties listed on the National Register – few of them have any binding protection. At present, Chattanooga has just one historic landmark: the Shavin House, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed residence perched on Missionary Ridge.
The city has only four local historic districts – St. Elmo, Ferger Place, Fort Wood and Battery Place – all established in the early 1990s. In the decades since, no new local designations have been made.
“That’s one of the things we’re trying to change,” Morgan says. “We’re working on a preservation plan for Chattanooga and Hamilton County – something that can help us take stock of what we have and lay out a strategy for how to move forward.”
That strategy might include expanding local landmark designations, offering financial incentives for rehabilitation, or enacting ordinances to prevent buildings from decaying past the point of return.
But any policy shift will require public will – a cultural recognition that these places are worth protecting, not just for their beauty or nostalgia, but for what they contribute to the city’s identity and economy.
“You look at places like First Presbyterian Church and the Medical Arts Building,” Morgan says. “They’re both on the National Register. The church owns the Medical Arts Building and they want to demolish it. From our perspective, there hasn’t been enough done to see if someone else could take that building and do something with it.”
Morgan points to growing local support for preserving the Medical Arts Building as evidence that public sentiment is shifting. An editorial plea to save the structure recently ran in The Chattanoogan, and preservationists are hoping that renewed awareness can lead to a better outcome this time.
But awareness has to come before demolition permits are filed, Morgan stresses.
“You have to use something like the Car Barn as a catalyst. Every time one of these buildings comes down, we need to have those bigger conversations.”
What comes next
By the time the excavators reached the Car Barn’s Market Street facade, there was no turning back. The bricks fell in sheets, the steel beams twisted under pressure, and the story that had once stood upright began to collapse into silence.
Broad Street still holds a visible trace – a standing facade, not yet dumped into a waiting container. For a moment, there’s still time. But Morgan doesn’t sound hopeful.
“If they had a change of heart, maybe they could save that one,” he says. “But I don’t see that happening.”
Drury Hotels has offered few details about the demolition or the decision-making behind it. The company declined interviews but, in response to an email from the Hamilton County Herald, said that “some of the original building materials” might be reused and that “many options are still being considered.”
But by the time the final option is chosen, it’s likely the building will no longer exist in any meaningful form. For Morgan, the loss of the Car Barn is the latest in a series of missed opportunities that seem to define the preservation struggle.
“We’re disappointed,” he says. “They’re dropping a suburban hotel model into an urban historic fabric – which would have been fine if the Car Barn were an empty parking lot. But it’s not.”
What stings most isn’t that development happened. Morgan understands progress is inevitable. It’s that no effort was made to find a middle ground.
“We weren’t asking for the building to be left untouched,” he says. “We said: save the facades, incorporate them into the design, use the existing brick, create a roof terrace above the original wall, tell the story of the site. They could have done something meaningful.”
Conclusion
While the Broad Street wall still stands – for now – the sense of finality has already settled in. What was once a utilitarian landmark will soon be the site of something new, efficient and indistinct.
For Morgan, the work goes on. While the bricks are being hauled away, he’s already focused on what this loss might make possible.
“Maybe this can lead to us having conversations about other buildings in the community – having more local landmark designations or incentives for historic properties. You have to use something like this as a catalyst for those discussions. Otherwise, in a blink of an eye, more gets lost. And you turn around one day and ask, ‘Why didn’t people defend these places back in the day?’”
Morgan says the loss isn’t about one building. It’s about a pattern he’s seen play out across Tennessee – a cycle in which communities look back, too late, and wonder what happened to the places that once gave them their character.
“I hear it all the time,” he says. “’We wish we’d saved this train station.’ ‘We wish we still had that courthouse.’ But once they’re gone, they’re gone. There’s no bringing them back.”
They’re history – literally.”