On a winter-edged afternoon, I meet Tom Bartoo at a pistachio-painted building to learn about a recent development in what I think of as the Battle for East Main. In the Battle for East Main no shot has ever been fired. No one has died (at least not as a direct result of combat).

Like so many aging commercial districts, East Main has suffered through a decades-long war of attrition. The victors have never stepped foot in Chattanooga, but the carnage, in the form of silent factories and shuttered warehouses, is very much in evidence. The Battle for East Main is not being fought with force of arms but with economic muscle.

Despite long odds, the combatants have never surrendered completely. A few factories still operate. A hodgepodge of small businesses, convenience stores, and local eateries inhabit some of the buildings, but the bloom of prosperity is a wilted memory. From street level, the much-storied downtown revitalization, a scant mile or two away, seems like something that’s happening in a completely different city.

From a higher vantage, there are signs that East Main is not doddering toward final extinction but merely experiencing a mid-life challenge to re-purpose itself for the next stage of its existence. For one thing, the street borders Highland Park, by all accounts a neighborhood on the mend.

Here’s where I admit that I am not an entirely a disinterested observer of events on East Main. In the local vernacular, “I have a dog in this fight” because I recently bought a home in Highland Park. That’s an admission that earns me admiration from some and something just short of disgusted-superior-looks from others, but whether I’m a naïve idealist or a cagey investor who got in early, only time will tell.

What’s certain is that each renovated home in Highland Park makes business investment on East Main more viable. Investors beget other investors. That’s why the area’s proximity to downtown is a distinct advantage despite surface perspectives to the contrary. A report from the River City Company, the non-profit organization that is leading the charge for revitalization, states that recently completed and planned projects in the downtown area total more than $336 million.

According to Tom Bartoo, the successful revitalization and the attendant rise in downtown property values, was the genesis of Wasabi, LLC. Bartoo and Brian Tune, who are the principles of Tune Design, Architecture and Interiors, wanted to move their firm from the location they currently lease off Bonny Oaks Road to a building of their own. “We were looking for a place downtown,” Bartoo says. “We wanted to be part of the revitalization, but we were having a tough time finding something affordable.”

Enter sculptor John Henry. In the 60s, he left his native Kentucky to launch a world-spanning career. Henry gained a reputation as an artist of the first order with his gargantuan metal sculptures. A few years ago, he decided to relocate to Chattanooga where he set up a workshop in a building off East Main. It was Henry who came to Tune and Bartoo with a proposal to buy the former Thacher Drug Company Building, located not downtown, but just down the road a piece. The three partners pooled their money to form Wasabi, LLC (a name inspired by their shared appreciation of sushi) and bought the building. Witness an airborne dandelion seed of development hesitate over downtown Chattanooga before coming to rest in the East Main district.

Bartoo acknowledges that he sees the redevelopment of the Thacher Drug Company Building in the context of a larger community vision. “Sure this is a rough area,” he said. “How do you combat that? You move into the buildings and get some business going.”
So, what do you get when you cross two architects with an internationally renowned metal sculptor and a two-story, 40,000 square foot building? What else but a mixed-used development featuring four living areas, an office space, a metal sculpture workshop, studios for several working artists, and a gallery not to mention pyramid shaped skylights, an area for casting bronze, and a roof-top green.

The plan may sound fanciful at first blush, and it is highly innovative, but the elements of this vision are practical answers to very real financial, architectural, and artistic challenges.
On the first floor, we’re standing in a huge rectangular room lined with support pillars. Bartoo shows me how one side of the building will be partitioned to provide a new home for Tune Architecture, Design and Interiors. The other side of the room will accommodate a number of open-ended artists’ studios. The center of the room will become a gallery, and Bartoo points to the ceiling above the future exhibition area, where the partners plan to install skylights to provide ambient light.

The wall beyond the gallery contains several bay doors accessing a loading dock right on the train line that operates out of the Chattanooga Choo Choo Holiday Inn. According to Bartoo, this creates the potential that the building could become a whistle stop, allowing visitors to watch the artists at work and tour the gallery of completed pieces. At the other end of the room, there are two doors. One leads to a two-story space that will become a bronze casting area. The other reveals the area that will be John Henry’s new workshop.
Bartoo leads up to the second floor. This space will be divided into four residential areas. For Bartoo and Tune, who plan to condominomize two of the units, combining their home space and the location of their firm under one roof, provides a cost savings that makes the deal more affordable. The partners also plan to lease the other lofts and the working artists’ studios as a source of revenue for the project. “None of us has a lot of money,” Bartoo says. “ We’re just average Joes. We’re not developers, but we wanted to invest in the community. This plan gives us a way to do that.”

For most of us, our home investment is a thirty-year prayer that our neighbors will mow their lawns regularly while resisting any temptation to rent their property to a band of crack heads. By purchasing a warehouse, Bartoo and Tune have cut their commute down to a short walk down a flight of stairs while creating additional revenue for all of the partners.
From an architectural perspective, the building is structurally sound. Much of the work will involve cosmetic restorations such as stripping the peeling coat of interior paint to expose the bricks and beams. In addition, they will remove the cinderblocks that currently fill the building’s huge windows like coins over a corpse’s eyes.

According to Bartoo, workers will also install a cistern capable of collecting 50,000 gallons of rainwater. This water will irrigate a “green roof,” which residents can access from the second story living areas. The skylights that provide ambient light for the gallery below will serve a second purpose. They will be shaped like pyramids so that their presence will create physical divisions on the roof. This arrangement will afford each of the living spaces a private area adjoining a larger common green with a sweeping view of the downtown area.
While a planted roof is an attractive amenity, it is not a useless luxury. Pumping rainwater to the roof to sustain the greenery also solves a storm water retention issue that could arise from adding some paved parking to serve the re-developed building. “Normally, we would be required to do a retention pond,” Bartoo says. “ Essentially, we’re moving the grassed area from the ground to the roof. It’s all about adaptive reuse.”

While financial plans and architectural solutions are quantifiable, Bartoo, Tune, and Henry also hope to achieve the less tangible goal of fostering creativity. By co-locating their operations with two loft apartments, several studio spaces, and a gallery, they plan to attract artists who would be able to live, work, and exhibit in the building. “There is a synergy that’s created when artists get together.” Bartoo says. “They can bounce ideas off each other.”

The Bread Factory, located at 17th and Cowart, is a model that foreshadows many aspects of what Bartoo and his partners are trying to accomplish. Rob Taylor co-owns the Bread Factory along with John Clark, Dr. Tony Leach, and ARTECH Architecture and Interiors. According to Taylor, the partnership fits the model of “average Joe” investors coming together around a shared vision.

The venture seems to be paying off. They redeveloped the former, Cameron & Barr Baking Company Building into 26 loft units. The project involved opening up a two-story area in the center of the main building as a courtyard and stairwell. The result is a common area with tables on the ground floor and a spectacular view of Lookout Mountain from the second story catwalk.

The Bread Factory opened in May, and occupancy is well ahead of what the partners anticipated with only four of the 26 units still vacant. Unlike the very conscious attempt to attract creative people that Bartoo envisions, Taylor and his partners had no preconceptions about likely tenants, but creative folk found their way to the place any way. Residents at the Bread Factory include a musician, a graphic artist, a chef, and two software companies among others.

Providing an environment that attracts and nurtures creative people may have ramifications that far exceed the successful re-development of a couple buildings. According to the theory propounded by Richard Florida in his book The Rise of the Creative Class, economic health in contemporary cities depends on whether they contain a large and flourishing community of creative people. According to Florida this “Creative Class” includes people in professions “whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, and/or new creative content.”

In a global economy where cheaper land, labor, and resources exist outside of the United States, it is easy to understand how our economy has shifted away from the traditional paradigm. Florida believes that innovation is the critical resource that fuels continued success and that the people who drive our economy are scientists, software developers, engineers, architects, educators, artists, musicians, and entertainers with a broader class of “creative professionals in business and finance, law, healthcare, and related fields.”
According to Florida, successful businesses are either emerging or relocating to areas that contain a high concentration of creative people. “Access to talented and creative people is to modern business what access to coal and iron was to steelmaking,” Florida writes. “It determines where companies will choose to locate and grow, and this in turn changes the way cities must compete.”

Florida’s ideas have touched off a wildfire of excitement among community planners and economic developers because his concepts seem to explain some aspects of the economic revolution that has transfixed so many communities in the overwhelming glare of oncoming change.

The Battle for East Main is not unique. In fact, East Main has a twin in almost any community of any size across the United States. The manufacturing and textile industries that originated the initial growth in the East Main area are not coming back. The Chattanooga/Hamilton County region does not boast a competitive concentration of the creative class, but perhaps, projects such as the Bread Factory and the one Bartoo and his partners have started will help to change that.

I’m standing on the roof with Bartoo, when I ask him if redeveloping a building like this has been a lifelong dream. He deflects my attempt to elicit a definitive statement that will play well in print. “I find that as you grow older in life you think, ‘Wait, I really want to make a difference,’” He says. “You want to make a difference in your community and in your livelihood.”

At 37, Bartoo sounds like a man who has decided to steer the mid-life obstacle course between Babbitry and “quiet desperation” by investing his time, expertise, and personal fortunes in the revitalization of an abandoned building in a depressed commercial district. And maybe, just maybe, the attempt will help shake East Main out of her torpor. but at the very least, this effort will establish a new foothold in the Battle for East Main.