Q. We’ll be visiting relatives in Nashville, Tenn., and they are raving about a new aquarium in Chattanooga. Do you know anything about this and is it worth driving a couple of hours to see? I think of aquariums as boring places that smell bad. — Alice B., Hollywood
A. Maybe you’ll be reassured if I repeat a conversation I heard while checking into the Opryland Hotel in Nashville last fall.
“Have you been to the aquarium down in Chattanooga?” an arriving visitor asked a bellboy.
The bellboy’s eyes grew wide: “No, but I sure plan to go soon. They have a catfish down there that’s bigger’n y’all,” he said to the portly questioner.
Well, not quite. The whopper catfish, which patrols the biggest freshwater display tank in the world at the Tennessee Aquarium, weighs 65 pounds and is 5 feet long.
When I was in Tennessee last summer, people all over the state were talking about this aquarium. They had either been or were going soon.
No wonder. The place is sensational. It opened May 1, 1992, projecting that 650,000 visitors would see it the first year. It passed that figure in 3 1/2 months, on Aug. 16. Soon after school opened, 30,000 school children were already booked for class visits.
The Tennessee Aquarium is one of the new breed of aquariums rising all over the country. They are architectural standouts of color and sound, clean and innovative with dramatic, realistic habitats.
The most successful have a “Wow, look at this” element, like the Tennessee catfish or the cascading waterfalls, crashing waves and shipwreck exhibit at the ocean-oriented, $52-million aquarium in Camden, N.J.
The soaring Tennessee Aquarium, a 12-story building with bold geometric shapes, sits on a bank of the Tennessee River near downtown Chattanooga at Ross Landing, a park created to show it off.
The $45-million, privately financed project is the only aquarium devoted to rivers, the first major freshwater-life center in the world. Inside, it’s a dramatic maze, with a six-story “canyon,” huge tanks behind acrylic panels that don’t break, scratch or distort views as glass would. Vivid graphics, mirrors, bright colors and lights are everywhere.
Visitors start at the top and proceed one way through the exhibits, making for less congestion. They travel to all the places rivers go, through evocative living environments that re-create the habitats of fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and insects that rely on rivers for their existence.
The whopping flathead catfish that swims through the Nickajack lake tank was pulled from the Tennessee River by a fisherman who decided to donate it to the aquarium. Most of the 120 varieties of wildflowers and plants were transplanted from somewhere in Tennessee. Trillium and ginseng were rescued from a roadside where a highway is being built, lady slippers were rescued from a construction site. Woody vines and moss came from the Tennessee River gorge.
The Tennessee River itself creates a rich source for exhibits: It rises in the Great Smoky Mountains, flows through a series of lakes created by dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority, touches seven states and eventually joins the Ohio and Mississippi to flow into the Gulf of Mexico.
Visitors who have ridden an escalator to the top floor — a high, glass-roof atrium — first enter a re-created mountain forest where they see live songbirds flitting through living trees, an otter sliding into a pool, snakes and salamanders, trout in a stream. A bird eats seed from a visitor’s hand; hairdos droop in the dampness.
Next is the Canyon, the long, six-story expanse flanked by multi-story, 138,000-gallon tanks, a lake environment on one side and a Gulf of Mexico exhibit — the museum’s only saltwater feature — on the other.
One tank has a spider web in the corner, a live spider giving us the eye. That was not planned. “We really thought we were a success when the insects moved in,” said Deborah Ayres, a publicist at the museum. And in fact the whole building, only a few months old when I saw it, has a lived-in feel; nothing looks raw or unfinished. It is as though it had been there for years, or had somehow just grown there.
There are many touchy-feely experiences for kids, and I suspect a turtle or two have gone home in the pockets of young visitors. All of which makes this a very comfortable place to visit.
In other rooms, great rivers of every continent are represented with vivid displays: red-bellied piranhas, an anaconda and a boa constrictor move through a flooded rain forest along the Amazon; a rock python poses in the Zaire river exhibit; a sturgeon swims through the St. Lawrence River display.
In the big tank representing a TVA-created lake, fish, turtles and amphibians inhabit sunken forests, stump fields, abandoned bridges and road beds in what used to be river shoreline. Mangrove roots grow in the Gulf of Mexico tank filled with stingrays, tarpon and other saltwater fish. The delta exhibit representing bays the river’s water will eventually reach is the soggy habitat of a cypress swamp where three live alligators and a 120-pound turtle are among the denizens.
New aquariums also have opened recently in Corpus Christi, Texas, and Newport, Ore. Others are under construction in Cleveland, Tampa and Charleston. The National Aquarium in Baltimore has added new sections and the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago has doubled in size.
The super-successful Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, which opened in 1984 at the site of old Cannery Row, plans a $62-million new wing by 1996. The Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans and the Texas State Aquarium in Corpus Christi are credited with helping upgrade decaying areas of their cities. A dozen more aquariums are in the talking or planning stages.
But not all have been successful: An aquarium in Norwalk, Conn., is a financial flop and a planned aquarium in St. Louis fell through. Karen Allen, director of public affairs for the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums, warns that the popularity surge of aquariums could spell overkill. She says that each new attraction needs something different to keep crowds coming.
Fort Lauderdale is currently talking about building an aquarium dedicated to sea life in the Gulf Stream and on Keys coral reefs. Let’s hope that if it is built, the city does its homework before ground is broken to make sure it is special enough to meet the competition.
Plan to spend at least two hours touring the Tennessee Aquarium. Admission is $8.75 for adults, $4.75 for children 3 to 12, under 3 free. It is open daily from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. from May 1 through Labor Day, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. the rest of the year, and is closed only on Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is located at 1 Broad St., Chattanooga, Tenn. 37401-2048.
— Jean Allen welcomes questions about travel. Send them to Advice and Dissent, Sun-Sentinel, 200 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale, Fla. 33301-2293. Personal replies are not possible.
