LITTLE ROCK — “Want to do a little spelunking?” Wooten Epes asked as he took his visitors on a tour of cavelike spaces.
Guided by a smart-phone flashlight beam that was almost swallowed by the dark, smelly passageways, the explorers forged ahead.
There are lots of passageways in 6 acres of space in the four downtown Little Rock buildings that will comprise the Main Street Lofts LLC.
The idea is to attack reclamation and conversion of the old buildings from the north, starting at Sixth Street, and work south toward Capitol, maybe in phases, says Epes (pronounced epps). He’s a longtime Little Rock lawyer, a native of Helena, as it was called in those days, and former head of the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration. He’s also one of the partners in the venture.
Another starting point is that most of the “improvements” of the past 50 years will be gone. Drop ceilings will disappear, revealing high, ornate ceilings.
Facades that are now merely bland veneer will be torn away to expose stylish fronts that date to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
On average, the buildings were erected in 1926. That’s misleading, though.
The Pfeifer Brothers Department Store was built in 1899. Expect its handsome front to yield wide windows soaring to the second floor, capped by decorative arches. The second floor already shows an expanse of floor with cast-iron posts and beadboard ceilings, whetting Epes’ appetite for the loft apartments that will be built there and in the other buildings.
The M.M. Cohn Building will show off its art deco style. It was built in 1941, toward the end of that era, but thankfully before the “modern” style — which Tom Wolfe excoriated as the bland International Style— gained the upper hand.
The so-called Annex or Kahn Building (1954) has been described as International in style. That may one of the biggest aesthetic challenges for the development, which will also have street level retail space.
The Boyle Building (1909) is the showpiece. With its Italianate glazed terra-cotta style, it is a 12-story wedding cake, with all the dreams and aspirations such a confection implies.
It was the city’s first skyscraper. If so, heaven may have been a lot closer in those days.
Six months after word got out that Mary Gay Shipley was putting That Bookstore in Blytheville up for sale, she has had no takers, although she has had some talkers.
She says that if no one steps forward by the end of the year, that’ll be the end of the renowned little shop that has drawn the attention of the literary world to one of the most unlikely of places.
Blytheville is not one of those literary oases in what H.L. Mencken labeled nearly 100 years ago the “Sahara of the Bozart” (his corruption of beaux-arts), a crude, unenlightened region.
That fueled the fires of the Southern Renaissance in letters, and the South has never looked back in that regard.
Aside from Hank Haines, the best Arkansas writer you never heard of (his short stories published in the nation’s best literary quarterlies should have been collected long ago) and former longtime editor and publisher of The Courier-News (disclosure: he was my boss), the Mississippi County town of 16,000 would have nothing to rebut that slander by Mencken.
Except for TBIB.
Shipley, 68, is looking for just the right person, or people, to take over the store that was home to an early and influential champion of John Grisham, Kathryn Stockett (The Help) and Rebecca Wells (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood). Noted writers such as Mary Higgins Clark (numerous suspense novels) and Malcolm Gladwell (author of Outliers and other books and a champion of Mary Gay in a New Yorker article) have also made it by for signings.
Mary Gay says the store’s 36th anniversary was last month, but “August in Arkansas is not a time to celebrate, so I think this time we’ll celebrate in October when John Grisham’s book comes out and so people will want to come buy a signed copy and have a piece of cake. He doesn’t come by and sign them anymore, he just sends us signed copies.”
Of the bookstore, she says: “It’s not a moneymaker. It’s a fun lifestyle. And it’s not a strain.”
“I’m not going away,” she says.
She wants a potential buyer to know: “I will be here and I will help you. I want to take you to the conferences and I want to take you to the training sessions. ... That’s one of the reasons I want to back away right now.”
She wants to find the right person who can take advantage of the cutting edge of bookselling at a pivotal time in the industry.
“Ten years from now I can’t do that.”
If you have a tip, call Jack Weatherly at (501) 378-3518 or e-mail him at
jweatherly@arkansasonline.com
Business, Pages 63 on 09/09/2012