Christmas in Quarter opens homes to tour

LITTLE ROCK — Jo Summar is the ideal spokesman for Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church’s ninth annual Christmas in the Quarter tour of homes.

It’s her second consecutive year as chairman of the committee that plans the event, a benefit for the church’s missions to feed its neighbors - pets as well as people.

And she lives in a Quapaw Quarter house that she renovated and which was featured on the first tour in 2004.

This year’s tour, 2-6 p.m. Dec. 9, starts at the church, 1601 S. Louisiana St., and includes five carefully chosen houses built between 1870 and 1910 and in a variety of late 19th- and early 20th-century architectural styles.

“I have been intricately involved since the onset,” Summar says. “I’m the liaison between my historic community and my historic church, which is my neighborhood church. So it was helpful for me to ask homeowners if they would consider putting their homes on the tour.

“And for the last nine years they have graciously, almost miraculously, come forward. They are very generous neighbors and the congregation works very hard.

“It’s the church’s only fundraiser,” explains K.D. Reep, a member of that hardworking congregation.

The tour features “historical homes, all of them decorated. It’s a wonderful way to inaugurate the holiday season,” she adds.

Perhaps the tour’s crown jewel, at least for the casual visitor, is the Villa Marre, 1404 Scott St., which Little Rock saloon keeper Angelo Marre built in 1873-74. The architecture, according to a church tour brochure, is Italianate with a Second Empire-style mansard roof.

The building’s purpose has shifted over the years between a private residence and a rental site for weddings and other gatherings, but it is certainly best known because director-producer Harry Thomason used it from 1986-1993 as the exterior of the Sugarbaker House on TV’s Designing Women.

“It was on the first [2004] tour, along with my home, but it has not been on the tour since then,” Summar says. It has gone through several changes of ownership and now serves as an event center.

Charles L. Thompson and Thomas Harding Jr. designed the church, Gothic Revival with Queen Anne characteristics; it was built from 1921-26. Thompson was also the architect for one of the tour homes, the Shelby England House, 2121 Arch St., built about 1910 in a combination of Colonial Revival and Prairie School styles.

The rest of the tour:

The Pollock House, 914 Scott St., built around 1870 by tobacconist Samuel E. Mandelbaum and named for its second resident, men’s clothier Meyer Pollock, whose family still owns it.

The Craftsman-style Xenophon Overton Pindall House, 2000 Arch St., which served as the Governor’s Mansion during Pindall’s 19-month (1907-09) stint as acting governor.

The 1907 John H. Martin House, 2107 Arch St., built in the Colonial Revival style, with a focus on simpler, more traditional layouts and facades as a negative reaction to what Summar calls “Victorian-era excesses.”

Each house has a history, on which visitors will get a lesson when they arrive; at each house there will also be appetizers, beverages and music, including strolling caroling minstrels as well as piano, organ and trumpet instrumentals.

Tickets are $20 in advance - call (501) 375-1600 or visit qqumc.org/citq or at the church, $25 day of tour and available only at the church.

A pair of trolleys will shuttle visitors between the church and houses, or you can walk. This year’s houses are well grouped, say Summar and Reep.

Back at the church, artists who use its studio space will show and sell their work in the library, with refreshments available down the hall in the chapel. A variety of vendors will have items for sale in the first-floor John Wesley Sunday School room.

This year’s goal is $9,000. Last year’s tour, in what Summar calls “a torrential downpour,” raised only half that much, she says, but still drew dedicated fans, including a Heber Springs couple who travel down for the event every year, rain or shine.

The money finances the church’s “feeding” missions for humans (a twice-monthly food pantry, a growing Sunday morning community breakfast that so far serves 200 low-income neighbors each week and the Sunday afternoon “Stone Soup,” with volunteers serving about 100 balanced meals) and animals (the Pet Food Ministry, which provides cat and dog food “to 75 poor and needy neighbors caring for beloved pets”).

Summar, petite and genteel, spent 26 years in the Army National Guard. She saw active service as a lieutenant colonel in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War at a 400-bed hospital in Saudi Arabia. She got a promotion to colonel when she returned to the States.

In addition to being a community activist and restorer of old houses, Summar, a North Little Rock native and Old Main graduate, sings soprano in the church choir and has occasionally been onstage (including playing Ouiser in a 2002 Community Theatre of Little Rock production of Steel Magnolias).

Summar admits that her own restored Arch Street house is “not one of the grand dames.”

One Mrs. Sides, a widow, built the so-called Sides Cottage around 1890 and, after leasing it to a bookstore owner, eventually moved in herself. Summar bought it in 2002 and moved in, after two years of extensive reconstruction, in November 2004. The work included a new kitchen - “I could show you the pictures, but suffice it to say it was extensive,” she says - and replacing the plumbing and electrical systems.

Before tackling that project, Summar, who moved to the Quarter in the 1970s, had renovated a Center Street cottage and the Gaines Street home of Julia Bernelle “Bernie” Babcock, novelist, poet, society editor for the Arkansas Democrat and founder of the Arkansas Museum of Science and History (now the Arkansas Museum of Discovery).

There is another annual tour, on Mother’s Day, sponsored by the Quapaw Quarter Association. It’s not affiliated with the church, but it is another chance to see historic homes, and Summar endorses it.

“You are either committed to seeing these wonderful houses saved, or you want none of them,” she says.