In the February 18 Global Prayer Watch email, I read this statistic: “Data from Explore TN Health ranks Lookout Mountain (37350) as the number one healthiest zip code in the state. Meanwhile, just down the street in Alton Park (37410), the neighborhood is ranked 604th out of 606 Tennessee zip codes.” Alton Park, the email said, is only six miles away from campus. This caused me to wonder at the stark contrast between life on top of the mountain and life at the base of the mountain and lament over the suffering that was so close and yet felt so distant. So, I sought to learn some of Alton Park’s story.
By 1901, Alton Park was a community of over 500 mostly White residents living in the recently developed farmland at the base of Lookout Mountain, just on the outskirts of the Chattanooga city limits. Its access to fresh water and natural coal deposits and its proximity to the city made it a prime location for manufacturing and economic development. In 1917, Alton Park was incorporated into the city of Chattanooga, and along with it, Hamilton County. The city provided tax incentives to support the growing manufacturing industry in Alton Park, and companies like Chattanooga Coke and Chemical and Chattanooga Glass Company moved to Alton Park.
Alton Park’s history is complex. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the area experienced rapid economic and population growth. According to Maria Noel, an Alton Park resident whose account of her community’s history is recorded in “The Alton Park Connector,” Alton’s population was once all White, and the park was once home to some of Chattanooga’s most prominent politicians and business leaders. However, in 1954, housing was built for the people displaced by the construction of the local interstate highway system, and many low-income families moved into Alton Park. The highways cut through poorer urban Black neighborhoods, pushing them to Alton Park.
This is a theme seen over and over in Chattanooga’s history: gentrification cleaning up an old city in some remarkable and even beautiful ways – and yet displacing marginalized people because of it. Noel wrote that the demographics of Alton Park have completely shifted. Now it is a low-to-moderate income, predominantly Black community.
Explore Tennessee Health ranks Alton Park’s top health factor as asthma. Part of the reason for this is caused by manufacturing and lack of environmental regulation. In the 1930s and 40s, one of the factories in Alton Park, Tennessee Products, housed its workers in company housing. All of the African American employees lived in one area, called the Coke Quarters. The company used coke–which was made from burning coal–to melt steel and iron. The coke was used because it burned hotter than gas and oil, but one of its byproducts–coal tar–is a hazardous, cancer-causing substance.
“[W]hat Black workers and residents didn’t know was that the same companies supporting them financially also impacted them through birth defects, cancer, and other debilitating illnesses and diseases. The absence of environmental regulations led to contamination from the dumping of coal tar, creosote, pesticides, glass and other industrial waste into Chattanooga Creek and on nearby land. Residents complained about the emission of fumes, odors and airborne particulates that caused respiratory illnesses, skin 10 irritations, and damaged the vegetation around their homes,” Noel wrote.
While much of this has since been reformed, there are still effects felt to this day, and this is part of the story of Alton Park, making it one of the least healthy places to live in Tennessee. Although the story of Alton Park carries with it pain and corruption, it is still a story of resilience and beauty. Noel highlights this.
“For me, writing The Alton Park Story is a love letter to sidewalk games and bicycle rides, to June bugs on a string and lightning bugs in a jar, to playing softball in an open field and sharing banana flavored Popsicles. It’s wearing funny hats at political rallies or eating free hot dogs and barbecue at the annual Fourth of July celebration; a day when everyone in Alton Park eats. It’s reading books about famous African Americans and later finding out what it really means to be Black. It’s a testimony about riding a raft across a polluted pond or walking by smoke filled chimneys. It’s wondering what Lookout Mountain looks like on the other side of a brown haze or why no other community smells like ours. It’s an early Saturday morning, when we cover our faces and evacuate; the science teacher, whose rose bushes warn us of chemical leaks; and the jobs lost, when companies close their doors because it costs too much to clean up. It’s watching families move out, businesses relocate, and schools and playgrounds close,” she wrote.
While the picture that I’ve painted is bleak in many ways, there is hope. Ministries such as the Bethlehem center seek to do the healing work of Christ in Alton Park, and projects such as the Alton Park Connector seek to connect the neighborhood to the rest of Chattanooga through a literal pathway connecting the park to the rest of the Tennessee River trail system, among others.
I write this not to make anyone feel bad about how much better we have it than them, or to create an us-versus-them paradigm that looks down at Alton Park with condescending pity. Rather, I write to point out some of the history of Alton Park and the history of Lookout Mountain, and how the systems in both of these places have impacted the health of the residents there.
The people of Alton Park bear the Imago Dei. They are broken and beautiful, sinners and saints, struggling and resilient–just like all people everywhere. And they are our neighbors, so we must love them. I don’t know just what exactly this looks like, but it is my hope and prayer that like the Global Prayer Watch said, God would bring restoration, reconciliation, peace, and flourishing to Alton Park and that he would provide an avenue for connection between Covenant and the Bethlehem Center, as well as other ministries there.
Maria Noel described what it is to wonder what Lookout Mountain looks like “on the other side of a brown haze.” May we come off the mountain, into the brown haze of fog that so often blankets the valley, and be the hands and feet of Jesus bringing about Shalom.