Last year attorney Mike Mallen stood on a 40-acre tract east of Moccasin Bend, where I-24 skirts the Tennessee River into Chattanooga. With him was sustainability consultant Peter Bahouth, who helped transform a 138-acre Atlanta industrial site into Atlantic Station, the high-end city-within-a-city that’s the nation’s largest urban brownfield redevelopment.

Mallen and fellow businessman Jim Frierson invited Bahouth to tour the former site of Wheland Foundry, whose 2003 bankruptcy had been just the latest economic and symbolic blow to a city rooted in manufacturing. At the court-ordered sale of Wheland’s assets, and encouraged by then-Mayor Bob Corker, Mallen and partner Gary Chazen had moved quickly to acquire the contaminated land. They had no real plan but to gain unified, local control over a site uniquely positioned near Chattanooga’s “Southern Gateway” at the base of Lookout Mountain.

Bahouth surveyed the area, an industrial graveyard set against a breathtaking backdrop; then his gaze stopped at Wheland’s sprawling, century-old neighbor, U.S. Pipe. Frierson recalls Bahouth’s comment: “If that ever closes and you could put the two pieces of property together, the whole thing becomes more compelling.”

In April, U.S. Pipe’s parent company, Walter Industries, shut down its Chattanooga production. Mallen’s investment group bought the site, which, combined with the Wheland property, mirrors Atlantic Station in size, interstate frontage and environmental challenges. The new potential for large-scale development has rekindled enthusiasm among community leaders who six years ago organized to promote investment in South Broad, which local business owner Ann Weeks calls “the last frontier” of Chattanooga’s revitalization. That renaissance started where Broad Street begins, at the Tennessee Aquarium, and has followed the street south—to where, for years, I-24 had effectively cut off the last mile of Broad, which ends at the Southern Gateway.

Having waged a successful war against South Broad’s crime and slumlords, the group created an exhaustive 2003 blueprint for a mixed-use urban community. But the plan became “looser,” Weeks says, with a new city administration less inclined than Corker’s to cultivate the public/private partnerships that underpinned Chattanooga’s most dramatic redevelopment.

With 140 acres under singular control, the landscape of the Gateway will change. Nonprofit planning agencies RiverCity Company and Lyndhurst Foundation are charged with finding “the best of the best” developers, Mallen says, to create a sustainable “live-work-play” community incorporating 21st-century industry.

“If we want to create a neighborhood of choice at South Broad, it’s got to be done with a bang,” says RiverCity’s Jeff Pfitzer. It’s a bang, he says, that “could reverberate through Chattanooga for the next seven generations.”