PATTEN TOWERS
Chattanoogans know the sound of the fire trucks and most of them know where they’re going when they hear them screaming toward downtown. The wailing doesn’t cause panic; for most, it doesn’t even arouse curiosity. But this time it was the real thing.
Saturday morning it was the real thing. Fire trucks and ambulances arrived at the Patten Towers in response to an apartment fire on the third floor. The building was evacuated and residents who had nowhere else to go were shuttled to the public library for shelter from the morning’s cold. No one was injured.
According to Chattanooga Fire Department Records, fire trucks responded to calls from the Patten Towers 302 times in 2009.
It wasn’t always this way.
In the weeks prior to its opening, the Hotel Patten was being heralded as one of the finest hotels in the country. It was among the finest in the world, some said, and on the morning of April 1, 1908, hundreds of local citizens lined the streets awaiting the hotel’s noonday grand opening. Everyone seemed to be out, from governors and mayors to local farmers who came to town to see the new “skyscraper.” For weeks the local papers had been printing stories about the new construction almost daily, building a sense of anticipation and local pride the city had never before experienced. When the front doors finally opened, those first guests were unanimous in their surety that this architectural marvel would make Chattanooga as recognized and respected as any city in the country.
It was indeed a sight to behold.
Passing through the front doors, guests found themselves in a lobby with ceilings 28 feet high, supported by great columns made from local Georgia marble. Surrounding the lobby on three sides was a balcony from which one could hear the sounds of a house orchestra. The chandeliers hanging from the ceilings were all individually designed by the architect to suit the room in which they were displayed and a grand piano had been specially ordered for the ladies’ parlor.
A restaurant on the first floor had walls of scagliola onyx and floors of marble tile. Plate glass windows touched gold leaf ceilings and flooded the dining room with the afternoon’s light. On the menu were Russian caviar and English sole, prepared by a French executive chef.
A bowling alley, barbershop and billiard parlor made the basement the place to be when the guests found time for leisure. The walls of the billiard parlor were finished in Flemish oak and sported the finest custom-made tables.
One of the hotel’s lesser-known accommodations was an underground tunnel that provided privacy for the famous and elite who visited the hotel. Jimmy Hoffa kept a room there when he was standing trial in 1964 at the nearby federal courthouse. John Kennedy visited the hotel, as did countless other Hollywood and musical celebrities who passed by train through the South. The Hotel Patten was by all accounts a place fit for kings and no expense was spared in providing guests with the most luxurious and modern pleasantries.
But by 2008, the Hotel Patten was no longer scraping the sky. It had been renamed the Patten Towers and was a project-based residential facility with a lawsuit filed against it in Hamilton County Circuit Court.
According to the suit, an elderly resident of the building was on his way to his room when he stepped out of his wheelchair and into a puddle of piss. He slipped and fell backward onto the grand old marble hallway and sustained serious neck and shoulder injuries. The lawsuit further claimed that the hallways of the once glorious Hotel Patten were constantly filled with “all manners of debris, including, but not limited to, urine, defecation, rotting food, empty beer cans, and other garbage.”
The nearest neighbor of the Patten Towers is the Pickle Barrel, a pub on Market Street whose back door faces 11th Street. I was sitting at a table by the window watching the sidewalk outside and I asked my server what she knew about the Towers. She laughed. “They sell their crazy meds on the sidewalk out here,” she claimed. “And when they get their money they come in here and eat hamburgers. That’s where the taxpayers’ dollars are going,” she added as she walked away. “Hamburgers at the Pickle Barrel.”
Another employee sitting at a table beside offered a second story. She claimed to be standing near the back door one night and watched a puddle of liquid sneak in from under the door. When she opened the door she found a man standing there pissing. She and a cook chased the man away, and she laughed when she told me how the man started yelling, “I only have one kidney! I only have one kidney!” She believed the man to be a resident of the Patten Towers.
The two girls went on to work and an old friend of mine came in for lunch and sat nearby. I asked him if he knew anything about the Patten Towers. He laughed and offered an explanation for the frequent fire calls. “They all get their checks on the first and start burning their mattresses,” he claimed. I told him that had to be bullshit but he said, “No. Residents of the Patten Towers set mattresses on fire when they get their monthly checks; it’s common knowledge.” He couldn’t explain why they would do such a thing; he only knew that it was so.
It seemed the modern marvel had become a magnificent slum. What was once a source of community hope and pride had become a place where they shit on the floors and throw their garbage down the hallways. A scan of old newspaper clippings regarding the Patten Towers highlights numerous problems, the most notable of which being a quote from a resident who claimed she avoided the laundry room for fear of being mugged. Community leaders stepped in to help clean up the mess but the shadowy stories of what the Patten Towers have become persist.
Stories that said the building had gone from being a monument to progress and community pride to being ankle-deep in shit with fires breaking out constantly. People missing body organs running around town spewing piss, and wheelchair-bound old women selling dope on street corners. It sounded like something out of a William Burroughs novel. Reading between the lines, it seemed like the biggest free-for-all party in town and I had to see it for myself.
I was walked down 11th Street and up the old Hotel Patten steps. The front door was locked and the security guard at a desk behind the door was unwilling to let me in. I went back down the steps as a man was coming up. I asked him if he lived there and told him I was going to write a story about the Patten Towers.
“I’m the one you need to talk to, then,” he said. “Come over here a minute.” He hurried back down the steps and out of sight of the door. He looked at me with a curious smile and asked if I was Robert T. Nash. I said I wasn’t and told him my name. His name was Robert Earl.
“Yeah, you don’t really sound like him. I’ve called in and talked to Robert Nash a few times. He hangs up on me too much. But look here, you got any credentials so I’ll know who you are? I’m not trying to be funny, but you know…”
I explained that I was a freelancer working for myself and didn’t have anything more than a driver’s license.
“Well, you seem all right. I usually get a feeling about people. I can tell. What is it you’re wanting to write about?”
I didn’t know. I told him I was interested in the building’s history and what it had become.
“Oh yeah, man. I lived here for five years.
This place goes way back. It’s a real nice place. Presidents stayed here. What was that gangster’s name? Jimmy Hoffa. Man, it’s a nice place.”
I told him I’d like to see inside and he said he’d be glad to take me. We went up to the front door and Robert said, “Tell the guard up here you’re going to 102,” and then he vanished.
The guard took my presence in stride. I signed my name on a visitor’s log with the security guard and was a bit surprised that he not only asked for my driver’s license but said he’d have to keep it until I left.
At the elevator around the corner Robert reappeared and told me we’d stop on the second floor. I recognized the ballroom there, but the elegance was gone. It was full of folding tables and chairs and drab government-issue tile had replaced the Georgia marble. A few people roamed around but there was certainly no party, celebrity-filled or otherwise. Robert explained that a local Seventh Day Adventist Church had for years served Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners to the residents here but for some unknown reason had not come this year.
The infamous laundry room was around the corner. New washers and dryers lined the walls and despite my expectations everything was surprisingly clean. The floors were not littered and the few residents about behaved like the residents of any other apartment community.
The building’s gold ceilings and marble columns were gone. Fluorescent lights had replaced the chandeliers. I didn’t hear any orchestra and no one offered me caviar or martinis. But I wasn’t mugged, either.
We walked up a flight of stairs and to Robert’s apartment. “Here we are. Home sweet home,” he said.
Home was an efficiency apartment overlooking the city. It was well kept and quiet. Pictures of his family hung on the walls and a blanket was thrown over the back of his couch. Recent newspapers and local periodicals were stacked neatly under an end table. Of particular interest to me was a bookshelf in the living room filled from end to end with books on spirituality. I even caught Carl Jung’s name on a few of them. There were no beer bottles piled high or whores sleeping it off in corners.
“You know, this is a nice place,” he said “It’s not big or fancy but I got everything I need.” I had to agree. It looked better than a lot of places I’d lived in myself and I started doubting that there was a story to be found in the old building.
On the way back down the elevator an older man stepped on. Robert asked him how a recent surgery had gone. The older man shook his head and smiled, saying it went as well as surgeries go. Hearing this I realized that I never asked Robert how he qualified to live there. I didn’t ask him then, either. I didn’t think it was any of my business.
Of peculiar interest was a meeting on the way back out of the front door. A woman was coming in and Robert introduced me to her as Christina Mack, the property’s manager. I told her my name and that I was a freelance writer working on a story about the Patten Towers and its history. She told me to call her if I needed anything and quickly walked away.
I called her that afternoon and was told by her assistant that Ms. Mack would not speak with me and that I would not be allowed back in the building. Subsequent phone calls yielded the same result.
Phone calls to the management company for whom Ms. Mack works were never returned.
A few days later I called Robert to ask him what may have gone wrong with Ms. Mack. He told me all I had to do was look at the old stories in the newspapers.
“Let me tell you something about Chattanooga, man,” he said. “Chattanooga’s a negative damn town. Everybody’s always got something to say. Everybody wants to say something but they usually ain’t about nothing. You know what I mean? Everybody’s got to have somewhere to sleep. And ain’t nobody perfect. But it ain’t nothing like what you read about. I mean, you been in there. You know.”
“Let me tell you something, though. I don’t mean to change the subject. This whole city is got a bad vibe. I took a class one time that showed you how to use your mind in different ways—how to use parts of your mind that you don’t normally use. I can feel stuff. I’m wrong sometimes but usually I’m right. I mean, this is a negative place. You know UTC used to be a prison with gallows, man. I know people who’ve walked around there and won’t go back. They used to kill people up there. I’m not saying it’s ghosts but it‘s something. It’s like that all over this town. This whole town’s like that.”
On Saturday I called Robert again. I was supposed to meet him that morning but he couldn’t make it due to the fire. He said he wasn’t going to stand out in the cold and went to a friend’s house. I asked him what he knew about the morning’s fire. He said most of the fire calls were from people burning things on their stoves while cooking. He knew the woman living in the apartment where the fire started and said she shouldn’t have been cooking anyway. “She can’t even stand up,” he said.
I had my Pickle Barrel lunch alone. From my seat by the window, I watched the temporarily displaced residents mill about in the street and on the sidewalks until they were loaded up and taken to the public library for shelter from the cold.
In the weeks prior to its opening, the Hotel Patten was being heralded as one of the finest hotels in the country. It was among the finest in the world, some said, and on the morning of April 1, 1908, hundreds of local citizens lined the streets awaiting the hotel’s noonday grand opening. Everyone seemed to be out, from governors and mayors to local farmers who came to town to see the new “skyscraper.” For weeks the local papers had been printing stories about the new construction almost daily, building a sense of anticipation and local pride the city had never before experienced. When the front doors finally opened, those first guests were unanimous in their surety that this architectural marvel would make Chattanooga as recognized and respected as any city in the country.
It was indeed a sight to behold.
Passing through the front doors, guests found themselves in a lobby with ceilings 28 feet high, supported by great columns made from local Georgia marble. Surrounding the lobby on three sides was a balcony from which one could hear the sounds of a house orchestra. The chandeliers hanging from the ceilings were all individually designed by the architect to suit the room in which they were displayed and a grand piano had been specially ordered for the ladies’ parlor.
A restaurant on the first floor had walls of scagliola onyx and floors of marble tile. Plate glass windows touched gold leaf ceilings and flooded the dining room with the afternoon’s light. On the menu were Russian caviar and English sole, prepared by a French executive chef.
A bowling alley, barbershop and billiard parlor made the basement the place to be when the guests found time for leisure. The walls of the billiard parlor were finished in Flemish oak and sported the finest custom-made tables.
One of the hotel’s lesser-known accommodations was an underground tunnel that provided privacy for the famous and elite who visited the hotel. Jimmy Hoffa kept a room there when he was standing trial in 1964 at the nearby federal courthouse. John Kennedy visited the hotel, as did countless other Hollywood and musical celebrities who passed by train through the South. The Hotel Patten was by all accounts a place fit for kings and no expense was spared in providing guests with the most luxurious and modern pleasantries.
But by 2008, the Hotel Patten was no longer scraping the sky. It had been renamed the Patten Towers and was a project-based residential facility with a lawsuit filed against it in Hamilton County Circuit Court.
According to the suit, an elderly resident of the building was on his way to his room when he stepped out of his wheelchair and into a puddle of piss. He slipped and fell backward onto the grand old marble hallway and sustained serious neck and shoulder injuries. The lawsuit further claimed that the hallways of the once glorious Hotel Patten were constantly filled with “all manners of debris, including, but not limited to, urine, defecation, rotting food, empty beer cans, and other garbage.”
The nearest neighbor of the Patten Towers is the Pickle Barrel, a pub on Market Street whose back door faces 11th Street. I was sitting at a table by the window watching the sidewalk outside and I asked my server what she knew about the Towers. She laughed. “They sell their crazy meds on the sidewalk out here,” she claimed. “And when they get their money they come in here and eat hamburgers. That’s where the taxpayers’ dollars are going,” she added as she walked away. “Hamburgers at the Pickle Barrel.”
Another employee sitting at a table beside offered a second story. She claimed to be standing near the back door one night and watched a puddle of liquid sneak in from under the door. When she opened the door she found a man standing there pissing. She and a cook chased the man away, and she laughed when she told me how the man started yelling, “I only have one kidney! I only have one kidney!” She believed the man to be a resident of the Patten Towers.
The two girls went on to work and an old friend of mine came in for lunch and sat nearby. I asked him if he knew anything about the Patten Towers. He laughed and offered an explanation for the frequent fire calls. “They all get their checks on the first and start burning their mattresses,” he claimed. I told him that had to be bullshit but he said, “No. Residents of the Patten Towers set mattresses on fire when they get their monthly checks; it’s common knowledge.” He couldn’t explain why they would do such a thing; he only knew that it was so.
It seemed the modern marvel had become a magnificent slum. What was once a source of community hope and pride had become a place where they shit on the floors and throw their garbage down the hallways. A scan of old newspaper clippings regarding the Patten Towers highlights numerous problems, the most notable of which being a quote from a resident who claimed she avoided the laundry room for fear of being mugged. Community leaders stepped in to help clean up the mess but the shadowy stories of what the Patten Towers have become persist.
Stories that said the building had gone from being a monument to progress and community pride to being ankle-deep in shit with fires breaking out constantly. People missing body organs running around town spewing piss, and wheelchair-bound old women selling dope on street corners. It sounded like something out of a William Burroughs novel. Reading between the lines, it seemed like the biggest free-for-all party in town and I had to see it for myself.
I was walked down 11th Street and up the old Hotel Patten steps. The front door was locked and the security guard at a desk behind the door was unwilling to let me in. I went back down the steps as a man was coming up. I asked him if he lived there and told him I was going to write a story about the Patten Towers.
“I’m the one you need to talk to, then,” he said. “Come over here a minute.” He hurried back down the steps and out of sight of the door. He looked at me with a curious smile and asked if I was Robert T. Nash. I said I wasn’t and told him my name. His name was Robert Earl.
“Yeah, you don’t really sound like him. I’ve called in and talked to Robert Nash a few times. He hangs up on me too much. But look here, you got any credentials so I’ll know who you are? I’m not trying to be funny, but you know…”
I explained that I was a freelancer working for myself and didn’t have anything more than a driver’s license.
“Well, you seem all right. I usually get a feeling about people. I can tell. What is it you’re wanting to write about?”
I didn’t know. I told him I was interested in the building’s history and what it had become.
“Oh yeah, man. I lived here for five years.
This place goes way back. It’s a real nice place. Presidents stayed here. What was that gangster’s name? Jimmy Hoffa. Man, it’s a nice place.”
I told him I’d like to see inside and he said he’d be glad to take me. We went up to the front door and Robert said, “Tell the guard up here you’re going to 102,” and then he vanished.
The guard took my presence in stride. I signed my name on a visitor’s log with the security guard and was a bit surprised that he not only asked for my driver’s license but said he’d have to keep it until I left.
At the elevator around the corner Robert reappeared and told me we’d stop on the second floor. I recognized the ballroom there, but the elegance was gone. It was full of folding tables and chairs and drab government-issue tile had replaced the Georgia marble. A few people roamed around but there was certainly no party, celebrity-filled or otherwise. Robert explained that a local Seventh Day Adventist Church had for years served Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners to the residents here but for some unknown reason had not come this year.
The infamous laundry room was around the corner. New washers and dryers lined the walls and despite my expectations everything was surprisingly clean. The floors were not littered and the few residents about behaved like the residents of any other apartment community.
The building’s gold ceilings and marble columns were gone. Fluorescent lights had replaced the chandeliers. I didn’t hear any orchestra and no one offered me caviar or martinis. But I wasn’t mugged, either.
We walked up a flight of stairs and to Robert’s apartment. “Here we are. Home sweet home,” he said.
Home was an efficiency apartment overlooking the city. It was well kept and quiet. Pictures of his family hung on the walls and a blanket was thrown over the back of his couch. Recent newspapers and local periodicals were stacked neatly under an end table. Of particular interest to me was a bookshelf in the living room filled from end to end with books on spirituality. I even caught Carl Jung’s name on a few of them. There were no beer bottles piled high or whores sleeping it off in corners.
“You know, this is a nice place,” he said “It’s not big or fancy but I got everything I need.” I had to agree. It looked better than a lot of places I’d lived in myself and I started doubting that there was a story to be found in the old building.
On the way back down the elevator an older man stepped on. Robert asked him how a recent surgery had gone. The older man shook his head and smiled, saying it went as well as surgeries go. Hearing this I realized that I never asked Robert how he qualified to live there. I didn’t ask him then, either. I didn’t think it was any of my business.
Of peculiar interest was a meeting on the way back out of the front door. A woman was coming in and Robert introduced me to her as Christina Mack, the property’s manager. I told her my name and that I was a freelance writer working on a story about the Patten Towers and its history. She told me to call her if I needed anything and quickly walked away.
I called her that afternoon and was told by her assistant that Ms. Mack would not speak with me and that I would not be allowed back in the building. Subsequent phone calls yielded the same result.
Phone calls to the management company for whom Ms. Mack works were never returned.
A few days later I called Robert to ask him what may have gone wrong with Ms. Mack. He told me all I had to do was look at the old stories in the newspapers.
“Let me tell you something about Chattanooga, man,” he said. “Chattanooga’s a negative damn town. Everybody’s always got something to say. Everybody wants to say something but they usually ain’t about nothing. You know what I mean? Everybody’s got to have somewhere to sleep. And ain’t nobody perfect. But it ain’t nothing like what you read about. I mean, you been in there. You know.”
“Let me tell you something, though. I don’t mean to change the subject. This whole city is got a bad vibe. I took a class one time that showed you how to use your mind in different ways—how to use parts of your mind that you don’t normally use. I can feel stuff. I’m wrong sometimes but usually I’m right. I mean, this is a negative place. You know UTC used to be a prison with gallows, man. I know people who’ve walked around there and won’t go back. They used to kill people up there. I’m not saying it’s ghosts but it‘s something. It’s like that all over this town. This whole town’s like that.”
On Saturday I called Robert again. I was supposed to meet him that morning but he couldn’t make it due to the fire. He said he wasn’t going to stand out in the cold and went to a friend’s house. I asked him what he knew about the morning’s fire. He said most of the fire calls were from people burning things on their stoves while cooking. He knew the woman living in the apartment where the fire started and said she shouldn’t have been cooking anyway. “She can’t even stand up,” he said.
I had my Pickle Barrel lunch alone. From my seat by the window, I watched the temporarily displaced residents mill about in the street and on the sidewalks until they were loaded up and taken to the public library for shelter from the cold.
"I was walked down 11th Street and up the old Hotel Patten steps." Cody is this the way you intended to write this sentence? Awesome Story. My Best Friends Grandmother lived in The Towers back in the early eighties. It was a Nice place then.
ReplyDeleteAllow me to necro this post but I am a current security guard there and this story still fits. Sure some of the residents are kinda crazy or doped up but it's not that bad of a place. It's clean and I've never even seen a fight or anything happen.
ReplyDeleteTay, I'm a graduate student at UTC writing a research paper on Patten Towers. I'm hoping to find out the good that is being done for the building as well as the residents, shed a better light on any improvements. Would any one be willing to speak with me? Thanks in advance for any help you could offer.
DeleteSue, I wrote this story. Feel free to email me at codymaxwell@live.com. I'd be glad to help you.
Delete