Downtown: Chattanooga

Unlike many cities in the United States, Chattanooga's downtown enjoys a vibrant nightlife. More and more people are returning downtown to live, work and play, and with good reason. Deluxe accommodations, more than 100 shops and restaurants, dozens of music venues and museums, and extensive public transportation combine to make the area between the Riverfront and Lookout Mountain attractive to visitors and residents. The catalysts for this resurgence of tourism and economic growth downtown are the Riverfront and the Tennessee Aquarium. Once the site of an abandoned industrial river port, the banks of the Tennessee River now welcome people, not barges. The Tennessee Aquarium is the largest freshwater aquarium in the country and features sea and land animals indigenous to the Tennessee River. More than two million people visited the aquarium in 1990, its first year of operation. Today, the aquarium, along with its state-of-the-art IMAX 3D, attracts one million visitors each year. A visit downtown isn't all about fish and 3D movies, though. The famed Chattanooga Choo Choo provides visitors a glimpse of the past, when the romance of the railroad lured men and women away from their homes in order to embark on a new adventure. AT&T Field is the baseball stadium for the Chattanooga Lookouts minor league team. Art lovers will enjoy a visit to the Hunter Museum of American Art, a beautiful Civil War mansion that houses both traditional and contemporary works from local and national artists. The Southern Belle Riverboat offers visitors a tour of Chattanooga aboard a luxury paddle steamer, and the Nightfall Concert Series brings the best of rock, pop, country and jazz to the Miller Plaza stage. © WCities