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You can preserve your history books and your polished museum famous. If you want the uncooked, uncut and slightly solar bleached biography of the Scenic City, you want best embark on a leisurely crawl down any of our major arteries. I’m talking, of course, about the grand, gaudy and gloriously continual saga told by Chattanooga billboards. These are not mere classified ads they’re the 50-foot-tall, vinyl clad city criers, the pixilated prophets of our daily trip, shouting the city’s private fears and wildest desires in a font you may read from quarter mile away.
Let’s talk about the real landmarks of the Scenic City, no, not Lookout Mountain’s dignified, misty peak. Not the gentle, artful curve of the Walnut Street Bridge. I’m talking about the other skyline—the one made of vinyl, LED pixels and sheer unadulterated chutzpah. I’m talking about Chattanooga billboards.
These towering, tenacious narrators line our interstates like a 50-foot-tall Greek chorus that really wants you to call a lawyer about that mesothelioma you definitely don’t have. They are the persistent, often puzzling wallpaper of our daily commutes. To ignore them is to miss the city’s most honest, hilarious, and aggressively public autobiography.
My own education in this civic tapestry happens daily on I-24, a stretch of highway that functions less as a road and more as a frantic, scrolling newsfeed for the soul. The journey begins with the digital Chattanooga billboards near the Ridge cut. These are the shape shifters the mood rings of the highway. One second, you’re met with a giant, frowning doctor, his face so pixel-perfect in its concern you can almost smell the antiseptic. “YOUR ALLERGY SUFFERING,” he booms silently, “ENDS IN 3…2…” and then, just as your nose mysteriously starts to tickle, he’s gone replaced by a shimmering, slow-mo pepperoni pizza, the cheese stretching in a greasy, golden HD arc that makes your stomach growl in betrayal at 8:17 a.m. The sensory whiplash is real. You went from sinus infection to supper in 1.5 seconds flat. It’s a master class in emotional manipulation, sponsored by local businesses.
Then you have the classic, vinyl stalwarts. These are the town criers, the permanent fixtures. There’s the personal injury attorney whose stern, trustworthy face has been sun-bleached into a faintly ghostly version of itself over the past decade. His slogan is a masterpiece of implied drama: “ONE CALL. THAT’S ALL.” You locate yourself inventing situations just to qualify. Maybe I should ride on that choppy sidewalk might he constitute me? A huge CGI-created bed lies just beside it, suspended on a cloud, where you can get a nap so deep that it can make you forget your existential fear. The opposition is poetry felony save on the left heavenly on the proper slumber. The Chattanooga Dream was naked.
But the true soul of the Chattanooga outdoor advertising scene, for me, lies beyond the corporate sheen. It’s in the handmade, the slightly unhinged and the deeply local. This is where Chattanooga billboard storytelling gets its flavor. Like the sign for a local produce stand, painted in cheerful, lopsided letters: “PEACHES SO GOOD THEY’LL MAKE YOU SLAP YOUR GRANNY.” (A concerning metric but you remember it.) Or the beloved, slightly cryptic church marquee that once read, “FORBIDDEN FRUIT CREATES MANY JAMS.” You spend the rest of your drive pondering theological preserves.
These signs are our id. They tell us what we fear (crippling debt, mediocre BBQ), what we desire (a hot tub, a reliable used truck) and what we believe (that somewhere, there is a discount carpet warehouse that will finally complete us). They track our seasons. In spring, the commercial Chattanooga billboards hawk pollen pills and pressure washers. Summer screams with ads for fireworks warehouses and water park deals, the signs practically radiating heat waves. Fall is all about pumpkins, haunted houses, and HVAC check-ups (a sobering preview of winter). It’s a cyclical, capitalist calendar.
And the roadside advertising on the older state highways, that’s where you find the ghosts of Chattanooga past, faded logos for businesses that closed before the internet, was invented, peeling paint on barns promoting long gone tourist traps. They’re like archaeological layers, telling a story of what this city was trying to sell itself twenty, thirty years ago.
Of course, the plot thickened with the arrival of the mega bright, animation ready digital Chattanooga billboards. They brought a new level of urgency. “AMBER ALERT,” they flash, turning your coronary heart to stone, best to seamlessly segue into “2-FOR-1 BUFFET WINGS!” The emotional rollercoaster is jarring. One minute you’re scanning license plates for a missing infant, the following you’re weighing deserves of Honey Garlic vs. Atomic. It’s a bizarre, jarring fusion of civic duty and consumerism that come what may feel uniquely American, if not uniquely Chattanoogan.
This is the visual clutter that planning commissions occasionally bemoan, the “sign pollution” that obscures our beautiful mountain views. And yes, sometimes when you’re trying to show a visitor the stunning approach to the city, only to have it framed by a giant, winking cartoon plumber, you get it. But to dismiss them as mere clutter is to miss the point. These signs are a democratic, chaotic form of communication. They’re the city talking to itself, in real time, without a filter.
They’re the local business owner shouting into the void, hoping her custom knife sharpening service will catch the eye of a passing chef. They’re the reminder for the metropolis’s annual chili prepares dinner off its font so exuberant you may almost flavor the cumin and experience the heartburn. They are, of their own loud, proud and sometimes cheesy manner monuments to hustle.
So the next time you’re crawling thru Chattanooga site visitors on 153 or barreling past the break up on I-75, appearance up. Don’t simply see the advertisements. Read the story. It’s a story of ambition, solace, worry, flavor and religion advised in 10-2d increments and 30 foot tall letters. It’s the story of us—our hunger, our aches and our dreams for a better sofa or a finer fried pie.
Our mountains tell a story of ancient silent beauty but our Chattanooga billboards? They tell the story of the messy, hungry, striving and hilarious people who live in their shadow and it’s a bestseller whether we asked for it or not.
