Last Saturday, I wrote about a Georgia developer named Pace Burt. Burt, who hails from Albany, is taking a chance on downtown Little Rock. He plans to turn the old Veterans Administration hospital on Roosevelt Road and the former AT&T Building on Capitol Avenue into apartments, bringing more residents downtown.
A healthy downtown Little Rock is essential to the economic future of the state. One requirement for a strong downtown is additional full-time residents. Their presence will fuel restaurants and retail establishments.
Burt said recently: "I was so impressed with Capitol Avenue when I drove up it."
Now perhaps Arkansas-based developers will take on the bleeding sores of downtown. That's the fact that the two tallest buildings on Main Street are deteriorating. No city can consider itself successful when its two tallest Main Street structures sit empty. Both beg for developers with vision who will transform them into apartments or condos.
The Boyle Building at the intersection of Capitol and Main once was slated to be an Aloft Hotel owned by the Chi Hotel Group of Little Rock, but those plans fell through. The Chi family, which has operated restaurants in Little Rock for years, purchased the building in March 2014 for $4.5 million.
In June 2017, Chi Hotel Group announced that it had dropped plans to open a hotel and would instead develop a 96-unit apartment complex. By December 2018, the building was for sale.
Chi Hotel Group purchased the building from Scott Reed, an out-of-state developer who talked a good game but couldn't deliver. Designed by famous Arkansas architect George Mann, the building has 107,298 square feet with 12 floors and a basement. It was built in 1909.
A couple of blocks south at Seventh and Main, the 14-story Donaghey Building was built in 1925-26 out of reinforced concrete and brick. It was designed by New York architect Hunter McDonnell and was Little Rock's tallest building until a group of investors led by Winthrop Rockefeller completed the Tower Building in 1960. The Donaghey Building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.
A Virginia-based limited partnership bought the Donaghey Building for $5.7 million in November 2018 with plans to convert the 184,000-square-foot structure into 152 studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments ranging in size from 540 square feet to 1,000 square feet. Within months, the building was back on the market.
Downtown Little Rock has certainly had its ups and downs during the past century.
"In 1915, the new Arkansas state Capitol building was completed on Fifth Street," Shannon Marie Lausch writes for the Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas. "With Main Street already flourishing as Little Rock's shopping district, the intersection of Main and Fifth Street, which was renamed Capitol Avenue, became the retail hub of the city given the volume of traffic to and from the Capitol."
The Arkansas Carpet & Furniture Co.'s building was completed in 1899; it later was remodeled and became Pfeifer Brothers Department Store in 1912, and after that, Dillard's Department Store.
The 1907 Pyramid Place was considered the city's first skyscraper. The Boyle Building, first known as the State National Bank Building, became the second skyscraper two years later. When the bank went under, the structure was purchased by John F. Boyle Jr. in 1916. It housed his Boyle Realty Co. along with various stores, restaurants and offices through the decades.
"Given that the heyday of the district's development occurred in the early 1900s, the district's architecture is dominantly 20th century commercial with art deco, Italianate and Sullivanesque details," Lausch writes. "Buildings represent the work of prominent Arkansas architects, including Frank Ginocchio, George Mann, Theodore Sanders and Charles Thompson. While the Great Depression caused development to suffer--even causing the newly built Lafayette Hotel to close for eight years--the district rebounded in the 1940s.
"Department stores opened new buildings or expanded ... . The M.M. Cohn Co. opened a new store in 1940, and J.C. Penney relocated to a newly built structure in 1957. Pfeifer (1954), Sterling (circa 1946) and Hall-Davidson (1946) added annexes. ... The 1960s saw the beginning of the district's decline as Little Rock expanded westward."
Park Plaza shopping center was completed in Little Rock in 1959, while McCain Mall was built in North Little Rock in 1973. In 1985, Interstate 630 was finished. Virtually all growth in Little Rock was toward the west.
"White flight in response to court-ordered school desegregation also decreased downtown's population," Lausch writes. "Urban renewal programs tried to combat the exodus but exacerbated the problem by demolishing hundreds of buildings, replacing them with parking lots and displacing businesses downtown. Little Rock Unlimited Progress zoned a large portion of downtown as the Metrocentre Improvement District ... .
"In an attempt to replicate the success of suburban shopping malls, the district became the centerpiece in plans to rehabilitate downtown to include a pedestrian mall. Private property owners within the Metrocentre Improvement District paid for the mall's construction through special assessments, totaling $4.5 million."
The mall was completed in October 1978, but failed within years as businesses continued to leave. Now, apartments and condos are the key as Donaghey and Boyle cry out for redevelopment.
Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.