About seven hours before Midtown Billiards was scheduled to reopen Thursday, owner Maggie Hinson stood behind the bar, giving orders over the sound of a drill and smoking a cigarette.
Longtime bartender and manager Nola Nysten stacked liquor bottles on the shelves while men wheeled in cases of Coors and Miller Lite to prepare for the bar's "soft opening."
"Close the door, it's getting hot back here," Hinson said as a shaft of morning sun poked into the dim, narrow space.
A man in a baseball cap stepped up to the counter with an update -- the Ozark Pale Ale Draft hadn't gotten picked up because of the July 4th holiday.
[INTERACTIVE: Explore renovated Midtown Billiards with these 360-degree photos]
Hinson shook her head and took a drag of her cigarette before replying.
"If that's all the bad news you have, it doesn't get on me."
There was still work to be done -- trash to be hauled out, lights to be hung, chairs to be arranged. But nearly 10 months after being shut down by a September fire, the business Hinson has owned for more than 30 years -- a late-night dive with a charm its regulars struggle to put into words -- was back.
Friday evening, the day of the bar's grand reopening, Hinson was on the other side of the bar, leaning on her elbows and chatting with the happy-hour customers trickling in.
Bartender Pat McCrackin, wearing a red T-shirt depicting the bar with smoke pouring out of its windows with the caption "Smoking Establishment," joked with people at the bar and sang along with the classic rock playing over the speakers.
The ice box was full of bottles, there were burgers on the grill and the plastic ashtrays started to fill with spent cigarettes. Half-empty bottles sat on the glossy new bar, a repurposed church pew Hinson bought from a church in Conway. One man knelt on a bench to sign his name on the wall.
A 3-foot-by-5-foot piece of the bar's old wall is bolted to the freshly painted wall near the front door. The old wall is significantly darker than the bright new one, worn by the years and clouds of smoke, and covered in scrawled-on signatures, drawings and stuck-on beer labels. A similar piece, along with two wooden bathroom doors, hangs farther back.
These are all that remain of how the bar used to look.
A hidden oasis
The exact year escapes Hinson, but her husband bought the pool hall, which had been in business in Little Rock since 1940 and moved to its current location in the 1970s, sometime in the 1980s.
At that time, the building opened at 6 a.m. and closed at 6 p.m., serving coffee and spam, egg and cheese sandwiches to older men who went there to play dominoes.
This was before the bar got its 5 a.m. license in the mid-1990s. For a while after that, the bar only closed for three hours a day to restock and reopened at 8 a.m.
"A lot of 'em quit coming in so early so they could stay late, 'cause they said it was more exciting. They'd play back there with the band just blaring," she said, gesturing toward the back of the bar.
Conan Robinson started working at the bar in 2000, eventually becoming a manager and bartending four nights a week. He remembers when the bar did away with the early shift and adopted its current hours, 3 p.m. to 5 a.m.
"When I started, they used to cook the burgers on this Wal-Mart electric griddle, you know, like you would buy for 30 bucks," Robinson said, forming a roughly 1-by-2-foot frame with his hands. "You just plug it into the wall and you could get about six burgers on it at a time."
Over the years, the bar, which now can sell dozens of its famous hamburgers a night, slowly got busier and busier, he said.
The bar was a longtime 2 a.m. happy-hour site for second-shift employees, from hospital workers to waiters, when most other bars had closed.
"It was kind of a hidden oasis because of the fact that a lot of the service industry people knew about it, so if you worked at a bar or restaurant you knew," Robinson said. "It was sort of a word-of-mouth thing for a long time, and then as the place grew, everybody started finding out about it."
As the River Market District developed downtown, Midtown Billiards began to get more traffic after those bars closed around 1 or 2 a.m. Over the years, Hinson and Robinson saw the south end of Main Street progress, too.
"We were here back when this was a bad area, and we've seen it change," Hinson said. "It's on the right track now."
Robinson said the bar's varied crowd never dissuaded people.
"You can walk in and you have guys that have tattoos and crazy hair with, you know, people dressed in five-piece suits -- and all ranges in between -- and everybody's getting along and having a good time," he said.
From the ashes
The two-story brick building that holds Midtown Billiards, along with the Raduno Brick Oven & Barroom restaurant and a private law firm, stands slightly taller than the rest of its Main Street block. It was built in 1930, and with a structure that old, Hinson knew it was possible for something bad to happen.
On the morning of Sept. 19, the bar was empty when a security camera recorded smoke wafting from a faulty refrigerator motor. General manager David Shipp said he and other bar employees had left about 20 minutes before the fire started.
When the Little Rock Fire Department arrived around 11 a.m., smoke was pouring through the bar's green awning, and orange flames licked the front windows. Neighbors and regular customers gathered across the street, some hugging and crying.
The building had to be completely gutted. Though the kitchen suffered most of the damage from the fire, fixing the building's smoke and water damage and bringing everything up to code took months. But the money Hinson, a former accountant, had been putting into insurance paid off the $450,000 worth of damage, she said.
The bar initially planned to reopen in January, but the three months turned to four, then 10. During those months, many members of her loyal staff of about 11 were out of jobs.
"It was sheer hell for everybody," Hinson said.
Some staff members picked up work at Four Quarter Bar in North Little Rock, which Hinson owns and Robinson now runs, or at TC's Midtown Grill in Conway. Other bars held benefit concerts to aid Midtown Billiards employees.
For regular customers, 10 months was also a long time without a favorite spot.
"I keep going to all these other places saying, 'I wish my bar was open,'" said downtown Little Rock resident Ash Gray, who has been going to the bar for more than 15 years.
By the time the music started Thursday, the bar's walls contained several new signatures and fresh stickers. A light hanging above one of the pool tables was cracked.
Hinson stood smiling in the crowd near the stage. Through the evening, she'd moved between groups, hugging and patting backs.
"There's so many that I haven't seen since September," she said. "I'm just so thankful."
She leaned forward onto one of the high steel tables and swayed to the music. Soon she was arm in arm with two friends.
Earlier that day, Hinson said it would take only one week, and everyone would forget the fire ever happened.
Metro on 07/08/2017