New Lamp Post/River City Collaboration to Rehabilitate Hamilton County Jail
In 2016, the Hamilton County Commission voted to approve an additional $460,000 in consulting fees to David Eichenthal’s PFM Consulting Group to tell the County the same thing consecutive Hamilton County juries have recommended: close the County Jail on Walnut Street. Part of Mayor Coppinger’s plan to sell the rights to incarcerate Black and low-income communities to CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporations of America) completely privatize all of the county’s jails, the pending closure of the jail has provided on opportunity for developers. The venture capitalist Lamp Post Group and the River City Gentrification Development Company have announced plans to capitalize on the existing layout of the county jail with a new condo development, Pen Tower at Walnut. The project will be marketed to tech entrepreneurs who are even more noble in their willingness to sacrifice space for convenience than those praised for renting micro-living spaces in the new Tomorrow Building at Georgia Avenue and Patten Parkway.
Those who appreciate sharing common space should find the condo development particularly appealing as residents will share the common areas of the original cafeteria and exercise area. Early architectural drafts call for replacing cell doors with antique walnut doors from various downtown renovations so residents will have privacy and not feel too much like they are in jail, but the condo sizes will remain the original less than 100 sq ft size of the old cells in fitting with the micro-living trend. The razor wire around the exercise area will obviously come down, though former City Councilman Chris Anderson suggested during a Southside Chamber presentation by River City’s Kim White that, if the area remained fenced, it would be a great site for a collective chicken coop, but doubted his Council replacement would reintroduce his urban chicken ordinance. Anderson also noted that the large windowless wall along Cherry Street would make a great mural canvas and perhaps the inmates could be exploited contribute to painting the mural before they are transferred to an enlarged Silverdale Workhouse. MarkMaking has begun the search for an out-of-state, white nationally recognized muralist.
The second floor of the jail which once housed the large, cold, and feces-smeared holding cell will eventually house retail and restaurant space. Lamp Post Group has begun deliberating on which recent start up with a prefix or suffix of CHA or Nooga will be engaged to work on branding the coffee shop and micro-brewery. Some early ideas include the coffee shop being named Graybars (not to be confused with Greyfriars) and the micro-brewery being named The Clink with creative beer names like Penitentiary Porter, Pokey Pilsner, and the Solitary Stout. The top floor will be opened up and renovated as a reservable, private event space called Club Fed.
Former City Councilman Moses Freeman, Jr. applauded the announcement and stated that residents of College Hill Courts should look to the example of the jail breaking it’s cycle of incarceration and violence and be inspired to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to end their generational cycles and mindsets of poverty. Indeed in Kim White’s presentation to City Council, she enthusiastically reported that one of the micro-living condos will be set aside for affordable housing at 120% of the median income of Chattanooga thanks to a generous PILOT agreement in which the city and county will indefinitely waive all future property taxes and provide Silverdale inmates the opportunity to provide free slave labor participate in workforce training in custodial and groundskeeping work.
Plans are already underway for a grand opening and mural dedication ceremony on International Human Rights Day 2019 sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce that will feature Stratton Tingle recording a Live From the (Former) Hamilton County Jail experimental album using a guitar with it’s strings replaced by white dreads.
