PINE BLUFF -- With the purchase of the Plaza Hotel, which adjoins the Pine Bluff Convention Center, city officials envision not just a working hotel but also a return to its glory days.
The hotel opened in 1988 under the Wilson World Hotel flag, the hotel chain founded by Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson. It had five stories, 200 rooms and consisted of 175,000 square feet. It boasted an indoor swimming pool, boutique shopping, a shoeshine service and a short, convenient indoor walk to the 90,000-square-foot Pine Bluff Convention Center and its 7,600-seat arena, 2,000-seat auditorium, 1,000-seat banquet hall and numerous meeting rooms.
The convention center opened on June 27, 1976. The next day, Dionne Warwick performed there.
"She was the first," said Harold Ashburn, technical director for the convention center. "We attracted a lot of big names."
In its early days, the convention center hosted concerts by Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Alabama, Cheap Trick, KISS, the Doobie Brothers, Willie Nelson and others, Ashburn said.
Sports events included indoor BMX bicycle meets, the Arkansas Razorbacks, the Harlem Globetrotters, professional wrestling matches -- even a John McEnroe tennis exhibition in the late 1970s.
The convention center was the first of its kind in the state, built specifically as a convention center.
"That's why it was a destination," said the current director, Joseph McCorvey, "because none of the other cities had a convention center."
Marty Huddleston, director of operations at the convention center, said the addition of the attached hotel provided a boost to the convention center, which he said is still only one of two convention centers in the state that provides an arena, auditorium, banquet hall and meeting rooms all on one level under the same roof.
"People really liked the convenience of being able to walk out of their hotel room and straight into the convention center," Huddleston said. "And when it was built, the hotel was just absolutely gorgeous. It was full-service, five-star, a real class act."
Bob Purvis was director of the convention center for 20 years, retiring at the end of 2017. He said he saw the hotel go into a decline over the years that ultimately forced officials to block the entryway between the two facilities.
"When I came there, it had gone back to being a Wilson World Hotel," Purvis said, noting that over the next several years, the hotel changed hands numerous times and fell more into disrepair.
Purvis said he wasn't certain just when he closed off access between the hotel and the convention center, but the move was necessary because of several factors.
"I don't know if it was 2015 or 2016, but we had wanted that door opened because we wanted the commerce back and forth between the properties," Purvis said.
"But the conditions became so abysmal." He said two or three attempts were made to get the hotel "to at least not have wet mops laying all over the lobby and just generally nasty conditions." Also, "they had some fairly unsavory elements hanging out over there, and we never knew from one day to the next if they were even in business, [so] to secure the convention center, we finally just closed the door."
Asked if the hotel's decline hurt the convention center's business, Purvis was unequivocal.
"Oh yes, definitely," he said. "In Pine Bluff, the things we had to market ourselves as a convention facility was that it was within an easy drive from Central Arkansas, we had good prices, we had good customer service in our facility, and we had a hotel attached to us."
Purvis said as the hotel declined, convention business began to decline with it as convention planners began looking elsewhere for meeting and hotel space.
BUSTLING BUSINESS
But in its heyday, people remember the hotel as a jewel in the crown of Pine Bluff.
Timothy Armstrong, a retired welder from Pine Bluff, had a side gig shining shoes at the Wilson World Hotel when it first opened. He remembers a bustling, busy establishment.
"It was nice," he said of the hotel. "It had more business then than you can really just think of. I was making good money just shining shoes."
Armstrong said business was brisk, not just at the shoeshine stand, but at the boutiques that lined the front lobby, the bar and the restaurant. He said it was at his shoeshine stand in November 1990 that he met boxing champion Muhammad Ali when Ali traveled to Pine Bluff for the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff homecoming.
"I shined his shoes and his brother's," he said. "He gave me a $100 bill and wasn't worried about getting his shoes shined."
Armstrong is the stepfather to Pine Bluff Urban Renewal Agency Director Maurice Taggart, who signed the paperwork in December on the purchase of the hotel and delivered the $1.2 million check to the title company that handled the transaction. Armstrong said he did a double-take when he read the news.
"I saw that and my head went to spinning," he said. "I said wait a minute. He done bought the place?"
Taggart said his role in the purchase was primarily to get the hotel back under control of the city. From the Urban Renewal Agency, the hotel is being turned over to the control of the Pine Bluff Convention Center and McCorvey, who has big plans for it.
"The main thing, the first step was acquiring it," McCorvey said of the hotel. "Now we control the destiny of it, which is very important. Before, we were at the mercy of somebody else's whims, and they just weren't going to do anything with it."
McCorvey's plans include getting the hotel branded with a major hotel chain flag and then arranging for its top-to-bottom renovation.
Estimates vary on what the cost will be to renovate the hotel, and at this point, it is not clear just where the money will come from.
Not all city leaders were on board with buying the hotel. Bruce Lockett, one of two City Council members to vote against the resolution allowing the purchase, said at the time that the city had no business getting into the hotel business, a view he still holds.
"I have great misgivings about a hotel that no hotel chain is vying to buy and that the city acquired," Lockett said. "I feel like we're going to be in a situation where all of the considerations that you have in running a hotel are going to be on us, whether it's rehabbing it, remodeling it, whether it's doing anything to it, it's now on the city.
"The feasibility study that was done by Urban Renewal put a price tag on it of $10 million to bring it up to the standards that we would feel comfortable with. So now that we've bought it, we don't have a $1.2 million hotel, we've got a negative $10 million that we've got to find somewhere."
Ryan Whatley, CEO of Go Forward Pine Bluff, a public/private partnership of local business people that is working toward the revitalization of the city's downtown, said there are several options to raise money to fund renovation of the facility.
"Between Opportunity Zone investors, bond financing and another option is a public referendum, all of these are possibilities," Whatley said.
SundayMonday on 01/27/2020