You know the place

The light at Gunbarrel that lets exactly two cars through. The 45 minute wait for a table at 4:30 on a Tuesday. The parking lot in December, which is less a parking lot and more a test of character.

We made a death metal shirt about Hamilton Place. A skeleton, drawn by local legend Travis Knight, holding the whole mall in its bony hand like it finally won. It's a joke. Mostly.

Before Hamilton Place was the scariest place on earth, it was the best place on earth. If you grew up in Chattanooga in the 80s or 90s, you probably remember that version. And it has a better backstory than most people know.

So grab a pretzel. Here's how a patch of East Brainerd woods became the center of the known universe, and then the center of all the traffic in it.

Before the mall, there were trees

Picture the corner of Shallowford and Gunbarrel. Now remove everything. The Olive Garden. The Target. The turn lanes. Your blood pressure.

What's left is roughly 200 acres of woods, pasture, and a few homes off I-75. In the early 80s that land belonged to five members of the Conner family. In 1982, Lou Conner, a Nashville lawyer, picked up the phone and called an old classmate from McCallie and Vanderbilt. That classmate was Charles Lebovitz, whose Chattanooga company, CBL, had already built Eastgate in 1962 and Northgate in 1972.

The story goes that Conner figured if anybody was going to build on his family's land, it should be his old buddy. It still took a year or two of trust building before the family sold.

Then CBL had to convince the big department stores, and the big department stores wanted interstate access before they'd even talk. So CBL spent about $4 million on ramps and roads. Chattanooga construction firm EMJ broke ground in late 1985.

Plenty of people thought it would flop. It was way out in East Brainerd. Nobody drove out there on purpose.

In hindsight, that's the funniest part of the whole story.

Putting the finishing touches on a brand new mall in the middle of the woods. Footage courtesy of WDEF News 12.

August 5, 1987: the biggest mall in Tennessee

Hamilton Place opened its doors on August 5, 1987. Two stories. About 1.2 million square feet. For years it was the largest mall in the state of Tennessee, and it was ours.

Opening day, August 1987. Footage courtesy of WDEF News 12.

The original anchors read like a roll call of department stores your grandmother had opinions about: Belk, Parisian, Loveman's, and Sears, plus a Regal Cinemas 9 right there inside the mall. JCPenney and Hess's moved over from Eastgate soon after. Proffitt's bought out Loveman's in 1988 and Hess's in 1992, so for a while there were two Proffitt's in one mall, which felt excessive even then.

It brought national chains to Chattanooga that we'd only seen in Atlanta or on TV. You didn't go to Hamilton Place to buy something. You went to be somewhere.

It also kicked off what local news later called the mall wars. Eastgate, the old champ, lost Hess's, Proffitt's, and Sears by the end of the decade and never really got up. Today it's Eastgate Town Center, mostly offices. Northgate held on thanks to loyal North Shore and Hixson shoppers, and CBL eventually bought it too. So the company won the war against itself. Twice.

The glory days

For a kid in Chattanooga in the late 80s and 90s, Hamilton Place was the whole weekend. Getting dropped off with a friend and $20 felt like being handed the keys to a city. You did laps. You looked at things you couldn't afford. You ate in the food court like it was a five star restaurant, because to you it was.

It was where you went for back to school clothes, a movie at the Regal 9 inside the mall, and the Christmas photo you still haven't forgiven your parents for. It was where your mom said "meet me back here in one hour" and somehow everyone actually did.

Mall Santas, 1991. Somebody in video is still mad about it. Footage courtesy of WDEF News 12.

CBL gave the food court a 6,000 square foot expansion in a big 1998 renovation, which tells you everything about what we were really there for.

Got old mall photos? We want them. Send your 80s and 90s Hamilton Place pictures to us on Instagram or by email and we'll add the best ones to this post, with credit. Bonus points for bangs.

Then it got out of hand

Remember how nobody drove out to East Brainerd on purpose? Yeah. About that.

The mall worked so well that everything else showed up to be near it. Hamilton Crossing opened alongside it in 1987. Hamilton Corner and Hamilton Village in 1990. The Overlook in 1993. The Terrace in 1997. Gunbarrel Pointe in 2000. One of the CBL guys later admitted that if they'd known how it would go, they would have bought more land. We believe him.

Gunbarrel Road was two lanes when the mall opened. Two. It's five now, and it still isn't enough. By the end of 2019, Chattanooga police had logged more than 1,200 wrecks in two years on just Shallowford, Gunbarrel, and Hamilton Place Boulevard. Holiday shoppers report that a 20 minute drive can stretch past an hour. That same holiday season, the city hit pause on road work out there until the shoppers thinned out, because there was simply no room for one more orange cone.

Along the way, the mall itself kept changing. The Regal 9 inside closed in 2007 and became a Barnes & Noble. Sears closed for good in January 2019, and in 2020 its old box turned into a Dave & Buster's upstairs and a Dick's downstairs. These days the mall even runs a youth escort policy on its busiest days, which is the most "we used to be the cool kids here" sentence we have ever typed.

And yet. It's still packed. An estimated 2 million visitors a year, counting the stores around it. Everybody complains about Hamilton Place, and everybody goes to Hamilton Place. That's not a contradiction. That's Chattanooga.

That's where the Hamilton Place Death Metal Long Sleeve comes from. It's a survivor's shirt. For anyone who has circled the lot for 25 minutes, waited two hours for a table, and still came back the next weekend.

Still standing

Plenty of malls from that era are parking lots now, or worse, "mixed use developments." Hamilton Place is still here, still loud, still the place you swear you're never going back to the week before Christmas.

We love it the way you love a relative who talks too much at Thanksgiving. A little exhausted. Completely loyal.

So if you've survived it, wear it. The Hamilton Place Death Metal Long Sleeve is designed by Travis Knight, screen printed right here in Chattanooga on a heavyweight Comfort Colors long sleeve. Grab one for less than a tank of gas idling on Gunbarrel.

Too scary for most. Perfect for you.

We didn't make up the history. Just the jokes.

Banner photo courtesy of ChattanoogaHistory.com. Thank you for keeping Chattanooga's history alive.

1. Hamilton Place: What a history. CBL flagship celebrates 25 years, Chattanooga Times Free Press, August 2012
2. 30 years and counting: Hamilton Place mall's opening in 1987 marked East Brainerd area's rapid growth, Chattanooga Times Free Press, August 2017
3. Hamilton Place celebrates 25 years as regional centerpiece, Local 3 News
4. From The Archives: Hamilton Place Mall Opening, WDEF News 12
5. News 12 Then: The mall wars of the 1980s, WDEF News 12
6. Improvements coming to busy shopping area, NewsChannel 9, December 2019
7. Hamilton Place to implement youth escort policy, WDEF News 12
8. Hamilton Place (shopping mall), Wikipedia