Standing on five vacant acres at the corner of 33rd and Broad streets, Claudia Barbera saw something that wasn’t there.
She could picture buildings rising from the property, businesses filling them and people bringing life to a stretch of South Broad Street she believes is ready for something new.
What she saw in her mind that day is now becoming Station 33, a mixed-use development that represents the largest expression yet of Barbera’s vision for the area.
“I stood in those five acres and imagined what it’s going to become,” she says. “My dad would tell you that my brain works in strange ways. I can look at a project and already see what it could become.”
That ability to envision what a project might become has shaped much of Barbera’s career. It’s carried her from an entrepreneurial family in Venezuela to Philadelphia and eventually Chattanooga, where a series of ambitious ventures in real estate has led her to Station 33 and a broader effort to bring new development to the South Broad and St. Elmo areas.
The project has consumed much of her life lately, but Barbera’s mind tends to move faster than the work around her. There are other ideas, other properties and other possibilities waiting their turn, prompting her team to periodically remind her to concentrate on the project in front of them.
“I’m a visionary,” she says. “I come up with these ideas and put them on the table. And my team will say, ‘One at a time.’”
Her response is characteristically impatient: “Well, hurry up.”
An entrepreneurial upbringing
Barbera was born in Venezuela to Italian parents and grew up the oldest of three daughters in a household where entrepreneurship was part of everyday life.
Her father, an engineer, built a company specializing in industrial projects, particularly for the aluminum industry, while the family also invested in real estate, beginning with residential properties and expanding into commercial holdings.
Her own independence came early. Barbera graduated from high school at 16, and because her parents had always intended for their daughters to pursue higher education in the United States, she left Venezuela for Philadelphia.
She arrived alone and with too little English to immediately enter college, so she spent her first year studying the language before pursuing marketing and business.
Veterinary medicine nearly pulled her in another direction. An animal lover, Barbera completed premed coursework and considered veterinary school, but business remained the foundation beneath her various interests. She believes that education has proved valuable beyond the confines of a traditional business career.
“Everyone should take a few business classes,” she says. “Business can take you to places that not all kinds of schools can.”
By then, Barbera was already putting those lessons into practice. After college, she opened a Mediterranean restaurant in Philadelphia and later sold it. She owned the building as well and retained it after selling the restaurant, an early indication that she was as interested in her properties as she was the businesses she was operating within them.
She and her sisters also accumulated residential rental properties in Philadelphia, but after Barbera moved to Chattanooga in 2005 because of personal connections, her interests shifted toward commercial development.
In 2016, she and a partner opened Veterinary Care & Specialty Group, a 4,100-square-foot animal hospital, on Tennessee Avenue. Barbera expanded the hospital to 15,000 square feet after moving it to Broad Street and later to 47,000 square feet.
Barbera served for a time as the hospital’s administrator, but even while working there, she kept looking for real estate opportunities. In 2024, she stepped away from her role at the hospital while retaining ownership of the property to focus more fully on development.
“I’ve always been more passionate about retail and commercial spaces than residential,” she says. “Why do you like to read fiction instead of history? One tickles your brain more than the other. Commercial and retail tickle my brain more than residential.”
Seeing what could be
The hospital also helped anchor Barbera in the part of Chattanooga that would become the focus of her development ambitions. When nearby St. Elmo properties became available, she and her sisters acquired them, assembling holdings that Barbera eventually envisions becoming another mixed-use development.
By then, the instinct that had drawn Barbera from operating businesses toward developing the properties themselves was becoming a pattern. One opportunity suggested another, and an individual building or parcel became part of a larger picture of what an area might become.
Barbera has a difficult time explaining where that instinct comes from. Her family, however, has long recognized it.
“My family will say it’s a little bit on the cuckoo side,” she laughs, “but it’s a part of who I am.”
Some of that instinct, she believes, might come from having seen so much beyond Chattanooga. With family roots in Venezuela and Italy and extensive travel elsewhere in the world and throughout the United States, Barbera has spent years absorbing ideas from places large and small.
She doesn’t necessarily want to reproduce what she sees elsewhere; instead, she thinks about which pieces might make sense in Chattanooga and how unrelated ideas might be combined.
“I’ve been able to look at things and say, ‘You know what? That will fit in Chattanooga,’” she says. “That’s how my brain works.”
When the property at 33rd and Broad became available, that process happened with lightning speed. Barbera says she saw the five acres and immediately envisioned what would become Station 33. As planning moved forward, others suggested modifications, including different layouts and additional surface parking, but she resisted changes she believed would dilute the concept.
What Barbera needed instead was a group of people capable of taking something that existed vividly in her imagination and working through the thousands of practical decisions necessary to build it. She uses an idea from the business book “Rocket Fuel,” which distinguishes between visionaries who generate ideas and integrators who turn those ideas into reality, to explain her role.
“I’m a visionary – 110%,” she says. “I have a group of the best integrators I could find, and without them, I could not do this.”
For Station 33, Barbera has surrounded herself with local professionals in construction, design, finance and other disciplines. The scale and ambition of the project could have prompted a developer to look elsewhere for expertise, but their Chattanooga ties are important to her.
“Chattanooga has the talent to bring a project of this caliber to life,” she says. “The people I have are not only local, but they’re very experienced in what we’re doing, and they’re leading the project to success.”
Then she offers a line that says as much about how she wants to be perceived as it does about the team around her: “Their names are more important than mine.”
Betting on South Broad
Barbera’s confidence in the project doesn’t mean she’s oblivious to the gamble involved. Station 33 represents a substantial commitment to a part of Chattanooga that has not yet experienced the concentration of retail, commercial and residential development found in other parts of the city.
Barbera says she’s never spearheaded a venture that failed, but she recognizes that doing something unfamiliar adds a layer of uncertainty.
“There are always risks,” Barbera says. “There’s even more risk in doing something that has never been done in whatever area you’re in. However, Chattanooga is ready for something like this. I know it. I’m not a Chattanoogan, and I know that it’s going to be well received.”
Her confidence is rooted partly in a broader view of South Broad and St. Elmo. Rather than scattering her investments across Chattanooga, Barbera has deliberately concentrated them within a relatively small area. The animal hospital, Station 33 and her family’s St. Elmo properties are all nearby, allowing each investment to contribute, at least potentially, to the growth occurring around the others.
After more than two decades in the Chattanooga area, Barbera’s concentration on South Broad and St. Elmo has made the work personal.
“I can do a better job by focusing on one area,” she says. “I feel like this is my neighborhood, so I want to improve it. Then the time will come when I might expand, or I might just retire.”
That interest in the community extends beyond Barbera’s own development projects. After her second son became ill, she founded the Connor Pullen Foundation, a nonprofit that later became part of Children’s Hospital and was renamed the Chattanooga Pediatric Foundation. Barbera retains a lifetime seat on the foundation’s board, a position that can also be held by a member of her family.
More recently, she has become involved with Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise, where she says she’s been interested in seeing how affordable housing and private development can work alongside one another.
“I’m excited to see both sides of the spectrum – low-income housing and private development – and how they can help each other,” she says.
Her vision becomes clearer when she describes Chattanooga from one end to the other. Downtown and the riverfront offer the Tennessee Aquarium, museums and other amenities, while the Tennessee Riverwalk creates a physical connection extending toward South Broad.
What Barbera believes is still missing on her end of that connection is the density of places to live, work, shop and eat that could make the corridor a destination in its own right.
“I want to believe that I’m doing something not only for myself, but for the community,” she says. “We still do not have the retail spaces and the commercial spaces and the living spaces in my end of town. So that’s what I’m trying to do.
“I’m trying to create a connection between what we already have by the river with the museum and all these other amazing things, and my end of town.”
More comfortable behind the scenes
There’s an irony in undertaking a project intended to attract considerable attention while having little appetite for that attention personally. Station 33 has forced Barbera into a more public role, including speaking at its announcement and groundbreaking, and she readily admits that standing behind a microphone is among her least favorite parts of the job.
Her discomfort isn’t a lack of enthusiasm for the project. If anything, the problem is separating the intensity of her enthusiasm from her dislike of being the person expected to publicly sell it.
“I’m super passionate, and I want to convince everybody that this is the best thing – the last Coca-Cola in the desert,” she says. “But do I want to be the one to grab the microphone and tell people about it? No.
“But I get it. I have to do it. I’m the crazy lady that designed this. But do I want to? Yeah, no.”
Looking down the road
Barbera would rather spend her time in the creative and building process, surrounded by the people who translate her ideas into plans and ultimately physical spaces. But the demands of Station 33 have consumed enough of her time over the past year that even some of the things she enjoys doing during her leisure time have had to wait.
One of those pursuits is rally racing. Since 2008, Barbera has competed as a codriver with teams around the country, an interest she traces to her Italian background and a shared love of automobiles with her father.
Rally racing was common enough in the culture around her that traveling a few hours to watch a race was nothing unusual, and after being introduced to a team in the United States, she eventually found herself inside the car.
Her role as codriver requires considerably more than sitting beside the person at the wheel. Before an event, Barbera spends days preparing routes and logistics; during a race, she reads notes and provides the driver with information needed to negotiate the course.
“For a rally codriver, you have to have a very good sense of logistics and planning,” she says. “For a two-day race, I work about a week ahead, mapping everything and planning where to stop and eat and get gas.”
It’s easy to notice the resemblance between the role Barbera occupies in the race car and the one she’s created for herself in business: looking ahead, processing what’s coming and helping chart a course toward something that isn’t yet visible.
For the moment, though, she’s put rally racing aside while Station 33 takes priority. The St. Elmo project is waiting, too, along with other ideas Barbera hints are already forming – even if her team would prefer she concentrate on one development at a time.
But that might be an unreasonable request of someone whose instinct is always to look beyond what’s immediately in front of her.