St. Elmo's Ice Cream Corner Changed Hands This Year. Here's the Story Nobody Connected.

If you walked past the base of the Incline Railway back in January, you'd have found Clumpies Ice Cream Co. sitting where it had sat for years, a few steps from where the railcars load for the climb up Lookout Mountain. By March, the storefront was empty. By July, there was a line down St. Elmo Avenue for free scoops until 10 p.m., and the sign said Jeni's.

Most residents saw two separate stories: a beloved shop closing, then a new one opening. What actually happened is one story. A single operating contract changed hands at the bottom of the mountain, and that handoff is the reason three different businesses turned over in five months, right as fall hands the neighborhood its biggest spectator day of the year.

The corner runs on one contract, not three decisions

Clumpies didn't fail in St. Elmo. It stepped back from a partnership. The Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority, which owns the Incline Railway, ended its arrangement with Clumpies in late 2025, and the shop closed its St. Elmo location in February 2026. Clumpies kept operating its other Chattanooga locations in North Shore and Southside, so nothing about the brand disappeared from the city. It disappeared from this one corner.

CARTA then signed a new contract with the Reinert Group to run the businesses and ticketing around the Railway's base station. That's the piece easy to miss if you only noticed the ice cream shop swap: the corner now has a single operator deciding what goes into those storefronts, instead of CARTA leasing space to whoever showed up next. Dillon May, the Reinert Group's director of operations, described the plan plainly when the contract was announced: the goal is a destination that works for tourists riding the Incline and for locals who just want somewhere to hang out. May's title matters here, because he's also the same person who signed on as Jeni's local franchise partner, which is why the corner's next two openings read like one plan instead of two coincidences.

That's the mechanism behind everything that followed. One operator, one plan, several storefronts filled in sequence rather than by accident.

What actually moved into the empty storefront

SoHi Pizza & Mountain Top Bar was first, opening in late March. Then came the headline most people noticed: Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams took the old Clumpies address at 3917 St. Elmo Avenue, and it isn't a satellite location of an existing chain. It's Jeni's first-ever franchise shop in the country, run locally by franchise partner Dillon May in partnership with Jon Reinert. The shop opened quietly in June and held its public grand-opening celebration on July 9, with free scoops from 6 to 10 p.m., swag for the first 50 people in line, and a giveaway for a year of free ice cream, one signature flavor a week for 52 weeks.

That detail matters for how you read the corner now. This isn't a national brand parachuting into a tourist strip. It's a local family betting on St. Elmo specifically, in the same storefront, doing the same job Clumpies did for years, just under a different name and a different flavor list, from Brambleberry Crisp to a seasonal Hibiscus Chili Punch Sorbet.

The rest of St. Elmo didn't get the memo, and that's the point

Here's what the Incline corner story can make you forget: it's one corner. Walk a few blocks up Tennessee Avenue and the businesses that have anchored St. Elmo for years are unchanged. Little Coyote, the Bib Gourmand-recognized spot known for smoked meats and house-made tortillas, still has its patio view of Lookout Mountain. Mr. T's Pizza & Ice Cream is still slinging thick-crust pies the way it always has. The Guild-Hardy Trailhead off St. Elmo Avenue still gives you direct, no-drive access to a rail-bed trail that passes Civil War battleground markers, runs by Ruby Falls, and continues on to the historic Cravens House.

None of that changed. What changed is narrow and specific: one operator took over one corner and used it to test what a "locals and tourists both" strip looks like when someone actually plans it instead of leasing it storefront by storefront.

Fall gives that corner a reason to get busy

The timing lines up with a fall calendar that's stacking real reasons to be at the bottom of the mountain on a given weekend, not just passing through.

• A weekly farmers market keeps running on a short trip from St. Elmo, with fresh produce and baked goods.
• Ruby Falls has already run one of its lantern-lit ghost tours after dark this month, the kind of after-hours programming that gives St. Elmo something to do on a weeknight without driving downtown.
• The Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum runs a Harry Potter-inspired train experience across two more September weekends, close enough for a short family outing.
• IRONMAN Chattanooga lands on September 27, and it isn't a downtown-only event. Residents in St. Elmo are close enough to the course to cheer on athletes without leaving the neighborhood.

That last one is worth sitting with. IRONMAN Chattanooga draws thousands of athletes through a swim, bike, and run course that runs right past this part of town. Every year, that day turns St. Elmo into a spectator neighborhood for a few hours. This year, for the first time, there's a rebuilt storefront corner at the base of the Incline with a pizza and bar spot and a first-of-its-kind ice cream franchise sitting right where people will already be standing.

What the Incline corner tells you about a St. Elmo weekend now

None of this required new construction. No new building went up, no new road cut through. What changed is that a legacy tenant stepped back, a transit authority handed off day-to-day control of its retail footprint to an operator with an actual plan, and that plan filled in fast enough to be finished before IRONMAN weekend rather than after it.

If you've lived here a while, the practical version of this story is simple. The bottom of the mountain isn't just where you catch the railcar anymore. It's where you can grab a slice at SoHi before a hike up Guild-Hardy, or close out a Saturday at the farmers market with a scoop from the shop that used to be Clumpies. The rest of St. Elmo, the parts that made the neighborhood worth loving before any of this happened, is exactly where you left it.

If watching a neighborhood's small businesses shift like this makes you curious about what's happening on your own street, or you're weighing a move into St. Elmo or another corner of Chattanooga, that's a conversation worth having before you start scrolling listings. Ricky Streeter works Greater Chattanooga and North Georgia block by block, not just zip code by zip code. Let's Connect.