I ran into Jacob Chi at the corner of Main Street and Capitol Avenue the other day. He and another man were trying to attach a blue and white sign to the plywood barrier on the sidewalk in front of the Boyle Building.
The sign was catching the brisk spring breeze like a sail.
Aloft.
That’s what the sign says.
The location is a launching pad for the future and a home base for the past.
Its history is long and still being written.
Jacob, a civil engineer, and his brother, Jasen, a rheumatologist, are first-generation Americans who came from Taiwan with their parents 30years ago, when Jacob was 5 and Jasen 9 years older.
Taiwan is the tiny island off the coast of mainland China - the colossus where one person in five of the world’s population lives.
Formerly called Formosa, Taiwan is where the followers of Chiang Kai-shek fled to escape communism, which grabbed control of mainland China in 1949, and still holds it.
Think of Taiwan as an economic and democratic incubator.
The Chi (pronounced chee) family loves Little Rock, “a great American city” as Jacob called it Monday when he announced that a hotel will be the new identity for the Boyle Building.
Outside, it will basically remain what it is, only more so: an elegant, ornate structure whose 105-year-old gleam will be polished in all its glazed brick, terracotta, marble, 12-story glory.
Inside, it will be 21st century in technology and minimalist style.
The Chi family came to America without much in the material sense, but obviously with a dream.
Freedom will do that to you.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish,” the book of Proverbs tells us.
Where there is, the people can flourish.
And the Chi family has. With five restaurants and two, going on three, hotels.
Already, they could’ve rested on the laurels of their achievements, Jacob said.
But they want to make a contribution to the city.
“Everyone at the Chi Hotel Group and every member of my family takes the restoration of this historic landmark very seriously,” he told the gathering in the hollowed out ground floor of the building on Monday. “We intend to honor the history of the Boyle Building by completing its restoration the right way.”
The building does have its share of Little Rock history and it will be hard to match the color and drama that occurred in some of its many offices.
It was built in 1909 and designed by George Mann - the architect who was responsible for shaping much of the early 20th-century style of the city - and called the State Bank Building.
That institution failed in 1916 and Johnny Boyle bought the skyscraper “for back taxes,” and renamed it after himself and his real estate firm, said Joel Y. Ledbetter Jr., who is president of Boyle Realty.
Boyle’s longtime secretary regaled the young Ledbetter with tales of his step-grandfather Boyle’s daring and brilliance. “He was a smart guy. He made a lot of money in cotton. She said he would go down to the cotton exchange [in downtown Little Rock] and gamble $10,000 on what he thought the cotton price was going to be at the drop of a hat, and he didn’t always come out ahead.”
The building has its own character.
“I love that old building,”said Ledbetter, 73. “It’s so solid and built with so much steel.” Its reinforced concrete floors are a foot thick, he said. “I don’t think a tornado would move that building an inch.”
He recalls the politically stormy days, “all the meetings they had up there” when Gov. Orval Faubus visited the Mehaffy, Smith and Williams law firm for counsel during the 1957 Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis.
As one era bled into another, the building appeared to have run its course. It had shared space on the south side of the first five floors with M.M. Cohn. The retailer moved out in 1989. The building has been empty since January 2000.
Which is not to say that suitors haven’t been buzzing about it, like stumpifying politicians, and other historical buildings in the block in recent years.
Boyle Realty sold it to Tower Investments of Woodland, Calif., in 2004, which had plans to incorporate it into a five-building development called Lafayette Square. That didn’t manifest itself so grandly. Another sale and then another, to the Chi family.
It will remain unoccupied until early 2016, when the hotel is expected to open and start the next chapter of the building’s life.
“It’s got great memories and I wish them well,” Ledbetter said.
If you have a tip, call Jack Weatherly at (501) 378-3518 or email him at jweatherly@arkansasonline.com
Business, Pages 69 on 04/20/2014