Pardon Me, Boy – | Been There, Seen That

It was some years before I got the joke.

For good reasons. I was only 13 when the movie came out, with no memory of the original reference, and you couldn’t just dial up any old song on your machine in those days. Still, I’m happy to say I saw Young Frankenstein in the theater, as I did Blazing Saddles that same year, which also included some references I didn’t understand until later, notably the names of Lili Von Shtupp and Gov. Le Petomane.

On the road home from Florida, we passed through Chattanooga, a city I hadn’t visited since sometime in the 1980s. I also have handful of memories of Chattanooga during our family road trip around the South in 1969, especially the hotel.

This time I noticed that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo was only a few blocks from the Interstate. So we paused our drive for a short visit.

“This landmark Chattanooga hotel located on Market Street in downtown Chattanooga initially served as the Southern Railway Terminal,” the Tennessee Encyclopedia says. “Designed by Beaux-Arts-trained architect Donn Barber of New York City, this magnificent architectural gateway to the Deep South opened during the Christmas season of 1909.”

With the mid-century decline of passenger rail in the U.S. came the near-demolition of the terminal, but the lesson of Penn Station and the era’s other thoughtless architectural destruction was apparently enough to fuel the Southern Railway Terminal’s preservation. With its redevelopment into a hotel-retail-entertainment complex came a new, instantly recognizable name: the Chattanooga Choo-Choo.

Inside, the sort of grand hall that marks grand old train terminals.