Amber Crouch, a staff attorney from the Arkansas Securities Department, and her husband, Courtney Crouch III, like their buildings old. They live in an 85-year-old bungalow in Little Rock's Hillcrest. Courtney sits on the board of the Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas -- a nonprofit that fights to save endangered historical sites -- and Amber is chairing the alliance's forthcoming fundraiser, the first Preservation Libations Master Mix-Off.
Crouch grew up in tiny Horseshoe Bend, but she often visited extended family in Hot Springs. She loved the bathhouses along Central Avenue but didn't know much about organized historic preservation until she met Courtney in Washington in 2001. Amber worked for then-Sen. Blanche Lincoln and Courtney for then-Rep. Mike Ross.
Courtney hails from a Hot Springs family of active preservationists. His father, Courtney Crouch Jr., has been awarded the Parker Westbrook Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Alliance and runs his insurance business out of a historic post office building, which he bought and renovated.
As a college student, Amber loved the University of Arkansas' Old Main, opened in 1875. But in the 1980s, the oldest building on campus -- now the university's marketing trademark -- was shuttered. For eight years, its future remained uncertain while interested parties debated renovation or demolition. In 1989, renovation won. By the time Amber arrived on campus in 1998, the building was open again.
"You know when you go back to a place and you get excited to see a certain building, that means that you're home. When you are coming in on [Interstate 49], you can see Old Main from far away. And when you're in Fayetteville, the views of Old Main are just spectacular. So many people have photos or paintings of Old Main in their homes," she says.
Amber and Courtney married in another historic building, Hot Springs' Arlington Hotel. In 2014, when another Hot Springs hotel, the Majestic, burned, Amber mourned for days.
"The opportunity was there to renovate that building, and it just got so far into disrepair," she says. "That was devastating to a lot of people, and it may have surprised some Arkansans who maybe didn't realize that they held it as such an important historic property."
Every year, the Alliance takes submissions from the public for a list of the state's most endangered places. Sometimes sites on the list are restored. Johnny Cash's boyhood home in the Dyess Colony was once on the list, and now it has been refurbished as a tourism site. Another former endangered place, the Woodruff House, built in 1853 in downtown Little Rock, was bought for restoration by the Quapaw Quarter Association.
In the midst of all this preservation, the Alliance is trying something new. It's rebranding itself Preserve Arkansas, and according to Amber, the Mix-Off is an attempt to interest young adults in the organization. This Prohibition-era cocktail showdown will pit eight of Little Rock's most notable bartenders, representing Trio's, So, Big Orange, 109 & Co., Heights Taco & Tamale, Cache, Ciao Baci and the Afterthought Bistro and Bar, who'll make two cocktails each.
One of each bartender's cocktails, which all attendees can sample, will be up for the audience choice award. And though the drinks aren't mixed yet, online polls are already open, at PreserveArkansas.org (click What We Do and scroll down to the event), for $2 per vote.
The other cocktails will be mixed live, in front of a panel that includes Phil Brandon with Rock Town Distillery, Matt Bell with South on Main and others, for a judges' choice award.
The Mix-Off will be held at the Albert Pike Memorial Temple in Little Rock, attendees are encouraged to dress in 1920s attire, and music will be provided by The Funkanites.
A $40 ticket buys admission, cocktail samples and access to an open wine and beer bar.
Amber says she and Courtney are whiskey drinkers: "He likes Scotch. I prefer bourbon."
Her go-to's are Manhattans and Old Fashioneds.
Is an Old Fashioned a Prohibition-era drink, though? She does a quick search on her phone.
"The first website that comes up ... says, 'The Old Fashioned was around before Prohibition and after Prohibition but never was it more needed than during Prohibition.'"
C'est la Internet.
She's the chairman because the whole Mix-Off was her idea, "since the cocktail culture in Little Rock is expanding and ... there's not been something like this in Little Rock."
She suggested that the alliance "put that event together and make it your own before someone else does."
She hopes it will become the organization's signature annual event.
And to weigh in on the whole "is all bourbon from Kentucky" debate -- "If it's a good whiskey, they can call it whatever they want," Amber says.
High Profile on 06/14/2015