Chattanooga Area Locations · · PAGE 17. 

November 18, 2020:  Wednesday continues our visit to Chattanooga heading across town via 23rd Street parallel to Interstate 24.  While "driving" down US 41 in Google Earth, I noticed their camera vehicle had driven up this access road to an older motel and restaurant half way up the west side of Missionary Ridge.  This place has a good view of  the Chattanooga skyline that is dominated by Lookout Mountain seen here on the right side of this image.  I have never actually been to this location in my car in all the years I lived in this area.  That is US 41 at the end of the road at the left side of this image.

This side view of the Sugar's RIBS restaurant has an excellent view of the city and Signal Mountain near the center of this image where the TV and FM radio transmitters are located.

This is an aerial view of US 41 connecting to the Bachman Tubes tunnel coming into Chattanooga at the west side of Missionary Ridge.  South Crest Road was where we took photos seen at the top of page  16.  The image above this one is the view from where the Google Earth man is standing in the parking lot of Sugar's Ribs.  The old motel is now Mission Ridge Apartments with the address of 2450 15th Avenue.

US 41 and US 76 get to the bottom of the hill from Missionary Ridge and turn right to work their way up to mid-town Chattanooga where US 76 ends and US 72 begins heading west across Alabama and Mississippi going to Memphis, Tennessee.  We will catch up to them as we head toward Lookout Mountain.  Our route today is straight ahead on 23rd street.  US 11 and US 64 have come down into the northeast side of Chattanooga alongside I-75.  Those routes came through the newer 1929 McNally tunnel under Missionary Ridge, then turned south on Dodd's Avenue parallel to the ridge until  reaching this intersection, then turning west across town on 23rd street.

Before I-24 was completed and opened for traffic in December 1966, this route on 23rd street was the truck bypass around the heart of the City of Chattanooga.  All the big trucks would come this way and so did we when we were going to see my grandparents who lived in Dade County, Georgia.  That is the most northwestern county of Georgia that meets up with Alabama and Tennessee.  We will not be going that far today.  I have a personal note about the opening day for Interstate 24 through Chattanooga.  The opening ceremony was held at 12 noon.  We used the new section of highway at around 5 PM that day.  It was Friday, December 18, 1966 when I started my first trip to California with my mother and the younger brother of my future wife.  That's another story for another time.
  

US 11 and US 64 continue across this intersection where you can see a right turn path ahead disappearing behind the trees where 23rd street was curved to run alongside I-24 before making a turn to connect to the south end of Washington Street at the intersection with 20th street.  US 11 and US 64 go west on 20th street to Broad Street where these routes join with US 41 and US 72 going south on Broad Street.  The BLUE line in this image is my GPS track showing our route today.  The intersection seen here is Rossville Boulevard which was US 27 before I-24 was opened.  The time was 9:26 AM when we started toward mid-town Chattanooga going north from this intersection.

Rossville Boulevard used to go beyond the railroad tracks ahead that created a dead end street.  The traffic now goes north on Central Avenue as seen here with our GPS track showing we also went in that direction.  There are still some private homes at this end of Central avenue, but most of this street going north is all commercial buildings.

Main Street is US 41 coming across town and we are following it to get to the marked US 41 route leaving the mid-town area.

Market Street heads toward downtown.  Along the way, Market Street passes the old Terminal Station that was associated with Southern Railway in the days before the jet age put an end to passenger trains, all except for Amtrak.  The two blue lines indicate I went north on Market Street and returned this way coming south.  This diversion is to show Linda a bit of the city ahead that is off the marked US Routes.

This is Terminal Station near downtown Chattanooga.  Today it is known to tourists and locals alike as "The Chattanooga Choo Choo" named for the 1941 song from the Glenn Miller big band.  Construction on this station was started in 1906.  The details about this historic building are documented in this Wikipedia article.  It is a hotel for tourists and train fans to sleep in refurbished Pullman railway sleeper cars today.  These railway cars were used when overnight travels by train were common before the JET AGE ended passenger rail service.

There was also another earlier train station in Chattanooga known as UNION STATION.  I had a chance to ride on a train from Dalton, Georgia to Danville, Illinois when is was 12 years of age in the summer of 1959.  That passenger train had a name and was called the "Georgian".  It passed through Union Station on the way from Atlanta to Chicago. Union Station has history back to 1858 and was owned by the Western and Atlantic Railway, a company owned by the State of Georgia.  You can learn about that train station from this Wikipedia article.  The Union Station was torn down in 1972.  Railroads today are all about freight service.

This intersection is where US 41 NORTH turns south on Broad Street which comes south from the heart of the city going toward the base of Lookout Mountain.  At that point, US 41, US 64, US 72, and US 11 turn north around the East and North sides of Lookout Mountain before leaving the Chattanooga area.  The US 41 sign seen here at one time had a US 76 ENDS sign posted here.  US 72 going west begins with US 41 NORTH that is going south on Broad Street.  US 11 and US 64 coming across 23rd street were moved over to 20th street for the connection with US 41 and US 72 heading toward Lookout Mountain on Broad Street.  The west end of 23rd street was destroyed when Interstate 24 was built.

Down at the south end of Broad Street is where FOUR US highways pass under a low railroad bridge before climbing up on the side of Lookout Mountain.  Since the modern day long distance freight trucks have trailers that are 13 feet 6 inches high, they cannot get through this underpass.  Most of that truck traffic is out on Interstate 24 completed in 1966 between the railroad tracks and the Tennessee River, on this side of the mountain.

Traffic coming on the other side of the low railroad underpass sees these route markers just before the road goes under the railroad bridge.  The sign with "VEHICLES OVER 13' 1" points the tall trucks to a bypass route around this bridge. Trucks go up the hill one block to a street that goes around this obstacle.  There is one bit of Google Earth information in this photo about the street name "Old Wauhatchie Pike" located to the left of the white "Exit Street View" box.  It was the original two-lane US highway route before 1937 when this four-lane highway was built at a lower level on this side of Lookout Mountain.

The other end of the truck bypass around the low railroad bridge is seen on the left side of this image.  That road is Saint Elmo Avenue which leads to a residential area of Chattanooga that is known as Saint Elmo.  The lower terminal of the Incline Railway is 3-tenths of a mile down that road.  About 2-tenths of a mile is the bypass street that connects back over to the US highways on the other side of the low railroad bridge underpass seen on the right side of this photo.  Mystery solved about  how the big trucks get around the low railroad bridge.

I have been up this road many times, this is the first time I noticed the sign "Lookout Mountain Parkway."  This is the view looking north from the signs seen in the photo above.

The Tennessee River below is usually 660 feet above sea level.  The water level is controlled by the dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).  When I-24 was built, the north side of the river banks were transferred to the south side along with tons of granite rocks to build the roadbed for the interstate highway.  The railroad tracks have been there for many years before I-24 was built.  The buildings of downtown Chattanooga are seen beyond the bend of river as it goes out of view behind the trees on the north bank of the river.  Missionary Ridge is the horizon on the right side of this image.  At the bottom of this image is the ever-present KUDZU close to this road and up into the trees.

This four-lane US highway has connecting roads to go up to the top of Lookout Mountain.  This one is carrying all FOUR US routes on the highway that is shown here going around the mountain.  Today, we are going up this route on the left to get to the top of Lookout Mountain.  There is a second road on the north end of the mountain going up from this four-lane highway.

When I was a boy in the 1950's traveling on the four-lane road toward my grandmother's house, the trees on the right side of the highway were not as tall as they are in 2020.  The other thing about the 1950's was the presence of real telephone poles, not  power poles very near to the four-lane roadway.  Look closely at the concrete retaining wall of the right lane, this is a long bridge tied to the mountain side by concrete pilings below the roadway.  The two-lane road we are taking to start climbing Lookout Mountain is on terra firma, not a bridge.

This post card photo from W.M. Cline is from the year 1937 showing this four-lane highway when it was new.  The trees were much shorter than they are now.  Those old telephone poles on the left of this image with glass insulators securing the wires have been obsolete ever since large bundles of insulated copper wires became the standard for the phone companies.  There are still a lot of those big black cables on the poles today in towns across the country.  The new fiber optic cables became the way to get signals out to the neighborhoods where only the last mile to the homes uses copper wires now.  Fiber to the home is available in some areas that will provide new services not possible over copper wires.  The railroad tracks on this side of the river are blocked from view by the trees back in 1937.  Of course, the Interstate Highway was not there until the 1960's.

Whether you go up the mountain from the East side from US 41 or from the north side of Lookout Mountain, this intersection about half way up to Ruby Falls is along the way.  This image is approaching from the North.  The cross road from the left that does not stop here comes up from the four-lane highway seen two photos above this one.  The road going straight across is "Old Wauhatchie Pike."  That road was closed off about half way from the railroad underpass with  some houses also remaining on that road near this end and near the south end.  The road from where this image was created is also part of "Old Wauhatchie Pike" going north from here as Tennessee route 318 eventually to US 41, US 64, US 11, and US 72.

This is the route up to Ruby Falls from the north side of Lookout Mountain starting at the RED SIGN on the four-lane highway. It is the end of the two-lane road seen in the image above this one.

Taking the right turn from the intersection in the second photo above will take you up to the RUBY FALLS attraction as seen in this image below from Google Earth on Tennessee state route 148.  The total distance from US 41 the way we came up from the East side of the mountain is only 0.65 miles to Ruby Falls.

I took this photo on January 23, 2010 standing in the parking lot across from the Ruby Falls sign on Scenic Highway route 148 that goes up to the top of Lookout Mountain.

This is their main building just north of the sign and flags from the photo above.  The entrance to the cave and the waterfall inside the mountain is via that building..