LITTLE ROCK — Flip to the index of How We Lived: Little Rock as an American City, and you won’t find a Midtown filed under “M.”
While you’re in the neighborhood, scroll on over to “P” and “Pulaski Heights.”
A century ago, this was Little Rock’s west Chenal and Otter Creek - the suburban frontier.
What cheap gasoline and Interstates 630 and 430 did for today’s generation of developers, the streetcar did for the neighborhoods up Kavanaugh Boulevard.
Throughout much of the nation, says planning consultant Ralph Megna, “Midtowns” are areas that were at the end of trolley lines a hundred years ago.
The seeds of “Midtown,” then, could be said to have been planted in 1903, the first year street cars ran northwest of Stifft Station to what is now Kavanaugh and University avenues. It may just be the earliest “precursor of Little Rock’s vast expansion to the west in more recent years,” wrote historian Cheryl Griffith Nichols in 1981 - in her George Washington University master’s thesis on Pulaski Heights.
Unlike “Midtown” and neighborhoods like Otter Creek, Pulaski Heights was incorporated in 1905 and was briefly its own municipality. Later, as a Little Rock ward, it was the choice residential neighborhood while the city wrestled with the Great Depression in the 1930s - a legacy thatremains in the minds of many residents.
Few residents of Hillcrest and the Heights neighborhoods would identify with “Midtown” before their distinctive neighborhood names, says John Selva of Pulaski Heights Realty and treasurer of the Hillcrest Residents Association.
“Midtown is very recent,” Nichols says. “I mean, people may have said Midtown 20 or 30 years ago just to generally denote what was considered the geographical center of the city, but they weren’t really giving a particular area a name.”
It’s no surprise a moniker so young runs into boundary debate. Even a neighborhood as established as the Heights has faced boundary disputes. In her thesis three decades ago, Nichols said, “There is some difference of opinion over the exact geographic area which comprises the Heights.”
Disputes notwithstanding, “the name means something to the residents of Little Rock, no matter how that meaning may vary.”
Sort of like “Clinton.”
Style, Pages 51 on 06/12/2011