The late-morning sun casts long shadows across East Side Elementary’s schoolyard as city officials, nonprofit leaders and community members gather under a canopied pavilion. It’s National Walk to a Park Day – a ceremonial stroll marking the city’s growing investment in neighborhood green spaces and its partnership with the Trust for Public Land to bring parks within walking distance of more residents.
Standing before the assembled group, Noel Durant, Tennessee state director for TPL, welcomes the crowd to the elementary school, which sits at the edge of one of Chattanooga’s densest urban neighborhoods.
“Nearly one in three people lack walkable access to a park,” Durant says. “When you incorporate quality time outside into your lifestyle, you’re physically and mentally healthier and more connected to your neighbors. Often, you also find yourself more civically engaged, which can make for a stronger community.”
For Durant, the event is an opportunity to highlight the power of partnerships. TPL has been working with the city of Chattanooga since 1994 on greenway development and urban park planning. The projects being celebrated today – the East Side Elementary Community Schoolyard and Lynnbrook Park – are recent results of that collaboration.
“The Trust for Public Land can’t do anything alone,” Durant says. “We have to do it in partnership. It’s a testament to what access to the outdoors can provide.”
The tour begins at East Side Elementary, where principal Greg Wilkey steps forward to explain why the transformation of the school’s large, underused yard into a shared public space is meaningful to the surrounding neighborhood.
“One of my goals when I became principal nine years ago was to make this a community school,” he says. “Our parents really support us, which gives us a strong sense of family, and this area is growing and developing. So I’ve always wanted to do whatever I could to make the school a place for everyone – not just the kids and teachers who come here but their families as well.”
For years, the land behind the school sat as a massive expanse of grass, empty except for the occasional kickball game or field day.
“I worried that it might be sold off for a shopping center or gas station,” Wilkey recalls. “I didn’t want either of those beside our school. So when the schoolyard project surfaced, I was excited. I thought, ‘Great – a park we can use during the school day and local families can use after hours.’”
Students also played a hands-on role in shaping the project, Wilkey says.
“We tapped third graders to help us design this. Then parents and faculty voted. I love the fact that kids had a hand in it. My hope is that as they grow, they’ll come back and visit the park they helped develop.”
No event of this significance passes without a proclamation from Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly, which Brian Smith, communications and marketing director for Chattanooga Parks and Outdoors, delivers. The proclamation affirms the city’s commitment to equitable access to green spaces and endorses the goals of the 10-Minute Walk program, a national TPL initiative to ensure all Americans have access to a park within a 10-minute walk of their home.
According to TPL research, parks that serve majority people of color communities are, on average, half the size and serve nearly five times more people than parks serving majority white communities. Likewise, parks in low-income neighborhoods are typically four times smaller than those in wealthier areas. Kelly’s proclamation frames the new investments as part of a broader effort to close that equity gap.
“The city of Chattanooga believes that everyone deserves equitable access to green spaces and seeks to ensure all residents have safe and nearby access to quality parks,” Smith reads.
After the proclamation, the group sets off on a walking tour. The route follows 17th Street, demonstrating its connectivity between the schoolyard and nearby Lynnbrook Park. Along the way, David Johnson, Tennessee parks and schoolyards program manager for TPL, provides a detailed overview of the schoolyard improvements.
He points out where a permeable sidewalk system will soon reduce stormwater impact and describes how student priorities – especially shade – shaped the design. Thirty trees have already been planted with the help of the Nooga Night Rotary Club, with 15 more scheduled for December. A basketball half-court is under construction, and a “tot lot” will give younger siblings a space to play.
A 3D climber connects to the existing playground, and the next phase will include an artificial turf soccer field.
“Chattanooga Football Club Academy already uses this space for soccer programs,” Johnson says. “So we know that’s in high demand.”
For Johnson, the East Side Elementary project holds strategic significance as the city’s first community schoolyard.
“This location has been thought about for this kind of intervention for decades,” he says. “People saw a big open green space that wasn’t really used or even usable. We just brought our expertise and our model of working with schools to the space to help it become what it had the potential to be.”
In turn, Durant explains why schoolyards are an efficient way to expand access to green spaces.
“In many communities, the largest public landowner is the school district. So being able to partner with school districts to create schoolyards to both improve student experience as well as park access means there’s potential to scale far beyond just having to go buy an individual piece of greenfield and turn it into a park.”
Because many elements already exist on school grounds, “you can finish it out into a more functional park space for a fraction of the cost of a new neighborhood park,” he adds.
The East Side schoolyard and Lynnbrook Park together represent $2.5 million in capital investment – $500,000 for the schoolyard and roughly four times that for the park. The project is funded through a mix of city, county, nonprofit and private contributions.
Collier Construction, for example, helped reduce costs by providing flatwork and gravel path installation.
“It’s all about community,” says Tim Trimble, Collier’s pre-construction manager. “It’s all about keeping families strong. This place is growing into a community where people feel comfortable and safe.”
The schoolyard is the first of several planned sites. TPL is already working with students at Hardy Elementary and preparing future work at Clifton Hills Elementary. Funding has come from sources like the USDA Forest Service and the Community Foundation, with capital support from Hamilton County. The aim is to build on the East Side model to create a network of walkable schoolyards across the city.
After about 10 minutes, the group arrives at Lynnbrook Park, a long, linear green space built along a historic Works Progress Administration drainage ditch. If the schoolyard illustrated how underused spaces can be transformed into community assets, Lynnbrook Park showed how ecological design can turn a flood-prone lot into thriving habitat.
Lucy Ellis, natural resource project coordinator for the city of Chattanooga, guides the group along a streambank that cuts through the center of the park, pointing to a lush buffer of native plants.
“This area of the park is in its second year of growing,” she says. “Before this was a park, this was just a straight channel, and about halfway down the park, the channel was underground and there was a parking lot over it. We removed a lot of pavement to build this park. We wanted to reconnect the water table with more of a natural flow.”
The park’s designers replaced the limestone-lined ditch with a more natural system that slows and filters water, improving water quality.
“You can put water into a pipe and shoot it away from you really fast,” Ellis continues. “But to reconnect the groundwater with the stormwater at the surface is important for water quality. You don’t get a lot of water quality benefits from shooting it down a channel.”
Ellis points out plants that stabilize the banks and capture pollutants, including swamp milkweed, showy tickseed and narrowleaf sunflower. Then Erin Duffy, also a natural resource project coordinator with the city, discusses how the restored stream system filters runoff and traps debris before it reaches the waterway.
“When we had that really big rain event a few months ago, we had a whole recycling bin stuck under the bridge here,” she says. “But even today you’ll see other floatable trash, like chip bags or soda bottles. That’s a really important service that this park provides.”
Over time, the site has matured into a functioning ecosystem. Frogs, crayfish, small fish and even a brown snake have been spotted. Monarch butterflies and caterpillars feed on milkweed. And sediment buildup has reshaped the flow of water, reducing stagnant pools and mosquito breeding.
“One of the great things about green infrastructure is that if they’re well maintained and well thought out, they actually get better with time,” Ellis says. “You don’t get that with a concrete pipe.”
The park was funded through the city’s stormwater fee program, which also supports the salaries of Ellis and Duffy’s division.
“I don’t mind paying the water quality fee when I know it comes to make a cool space like this,” Johnson remarks.
Durant closes the tour by providing a bit of history. Lynnbrook Park was identified through a citywide mapping exercise supported by the Benwood Foundation. TPL and the city overlaid data on water quality, park access, urban heat, public health and historic underinvestment to pinpoint the highest priority sites. Lynnbrook was at the top of the list.
“This site was owned by the city,” Durant says. “It was acquired as part of a back tax acquisition. It was a brownfield. So there was a lot of opportunity for impact on this city-owned parcel.”
Today, Lynnbrook Park sits amid a changing neighborhood. Across the street, a 60-unit permanent supportive housing development by the AIM Center is under construction, a project Johnson says illustrates how green spaces like this can complement high-density residential land use.
The event ended where it began – back at East Side Elementary – but with a new sense of how two strategically located green spaces can knit a neighborhood together. In just a short walk, the group had moved from a redesigned schoolyard to a restored stream corridor, experiencing firsthand the city’s approach to walkable park access and nature-based solutions.
Durant framed it simply: “These two sites combined are creating park access for roughly 5,000 people in the city of Chattanooga. This is a great place to highlight the improvements that are made as well as the need to continue to invest where parks are needed most.”