Glass Street Gateway Community Workshops Focus on Improvements & Interventions  

Teams finalizing ideas to pitch for Fall installations

Our Collective is newly energized after this weekend’s Planning-By-Doing workshop. We had a gorgeous day on Saturday morning for our five teams to immerse themselves in imagining a safe and inviting Glass Street Gateway. The Gateway is a 5-minute walking radius from Crutchfield Street including the Dodson Avenue and Glass Street intersection as well as the Save a Lot, local YFD, and Hardy Elementary. 

We gathered under trees at the YFD, under canopies at the Save A Lot, and at intersections, crosswalks, and bus stops to take a good look all around us. We also paid attention to the asphalt beneath our feet, especially along Crutchfield Street where ideas for a new street mural next to the grocery store were brainstormed from a variety of perspectives. 

The most important perspective is that of our neighbors in Glass Farm, which is why each of our multi-disciplinary teams included residents who live in the focus area. And in case you are wondering about all this pop-up foot traffic during our workshop and walkabouts, we are here to tell you the Glass Street Gateway is big enough for everyone! In fact, one of the objectives of the workshop was to come up with ideas that will accommodate increased pedestrian activities in the area.  Ultimately we hope to use the input gathered in the workshop and lessons learned in the temporary projects to create a community-driven plan for the public realm surrounding the Dodson and Glass intersection. 

We also created some serious buzz (see links below), but rest assure that everyone was practicing carefully thought-out physical distancing protocols. We made sure that teams were small but mighty with less than 10 people assigned to each.  Before beginning, team facilitators were ready with digital thermometers to take everyone’s temperatures when arriving at five different sites within the Gateway. From there, masked participants received individually wrapped toolkits for the day, with work tables and chairs spread out to accommodate basic best practices.  Each team will continue to work together safely with virtual meetings this week to solidify their tactical intervention ideas to implement and test this fall with their $3,000 budgets. 

Community engagement looks different these days but it sure feels the same! Fantastic!

Thanks go to our dream team of partners, friends, neighbors, and GHC staff for making this happen including AIA-Chattanooga, Street Plans, and Chattanooga Design Studio.  Thanks to Sanwell PR and all members of the media who came out and helped share our good news. Check out the video reel by scrolling all the way down!

MEDIA LINKS
WDEF-TV 12 – Glass Street Gateway Improvements
WRCB-TV 3 – Planning By DoingWorkshop Participants Create New Projects for Improvements To Glass Street 
Live With Greg Funderberg – Glass House Collective Uses Community Workshops to Revamp Glass Street