Reviving Capitol Avenue
After four years in Washington, D.C., as the bureau chief for the Arkansas Democrat,I moved back to Arkansas in late 1989. I needed to open a checking account.
My method of finding a bank wasn’t complicated. I walked out of the newspaper office at the corner of Capitol Avenue and Scott Street in downtown Little Rock, took a left, and headed west. I stopped at the first bank I came to, Union National Bank. I still have that account more than 28 years later, but I’m on my fifth bank. Little Rock’s Worthen Bank & Trust Co. later bought Union. Boatmen’s Bancshares of St. Louis took over Worthen. In 1996, NationsBank acquired Boatmen’s. Two years later, Bank of America purchased NationsBank. Last week, it was announced that Bank of America will no longer offer banking services in the massive lobby of what once was the 23-story Worthen Bank tower.
The skyline of Little Rock began to change with the construction of that building and the adjacent Union Building in the late 1960s. Worthen topped out at
375 feet. Union was 331 feet. Both surpassed what previously had been the state’s tallest structure, the Tower Building in downtown Little Rock.
It had been constructed in 1959-60 by a group of businessmen led by Winthrop Rockefeller. In 1975, First National Bank built a 30-story tower that topped out at 454 feet. That’s now the Regions Bank Building. In 1986, the 40-story TCBY Tower topped out at 547 feet. It’s now the Simmons Bank Tower.
The bank lobbies of those buildings became dinosaurs. In a sense, last week’s announcement marked the end of an era for downtown Little Rock. The previous month, two restaurants along the same stretch of street closed. Owner Justin Patterson shut down his Southern Gourmasian, which featured interesting fusion dishes. And Sufficient Grounds Cafe on the first floor of the Union Building shut down after 15 years.
The revitalization effort that has transformed the River Market District and Main Street needs to migrate to Capitol Avenue. There are some bright spots, mind you. On the east end of the street, the hip bowling alley and restaurant Dust Bowl Lanes & Lounge opened earlier this year. Last week, the German beer garden and restaurant Fassler Hall opened next door at 311 E. Capitol. Both are owned by a Tulsa-based company and will bring additional life to that part of the street.
Farther west, across from the Bank of America Tower, VCC Construction announced that it will renovate the Hall-Davidson buildings and open a boutique hotel. Its flag will be a relatively new upscale brand from Marriott, AC Hotel. There will be 112 rooms, a bar and a restaurant that should bring more activity to the intersection of Capitol and Louisiana. The five-story Hall Building was built in 1923, and the three-story Davidson Annex was constructed in 1947. The structures are on the National Register of Historic Places. To keep that nascent momentum going, several things must happen sooner rather than later along Capitol. The first is the renovation of the 1909 Boyle Building at the corner of Capitol and Main. Everyone who’s involved with development in downtown Little Rock tells me that the building is a key to additional activity on Capitol. They also express frustration at the lack of progress. It has been four years since the Chi family of Little Rock announced that it would renovate the building for an Aloft Hotel. The Aloft signs went up, and then they came down. Last summer, it was announced that Jacob Chi was considering putting 96 apartments in the Boyle Building.
In a statement on my Facebook page, Chi said: “Plans for the Boyle Building’s redevelopment have been procured, redone and further refined nine times just in the time since my family purchased the building. There are structural modifications that need to be made to the building. Essentially the Boyle Building has to be rebuilt from the inside out. That takes time and money. But it also takes care, dedication and commitment to the structure instead of taking the easy way out and cheapening the end product of the development. … I will not under any circumstance allow the reconstruction of the Boyle Building to be cheapened or for corners to be cut.”
It’s also essential to move forward with development of what’s being called the Financial Quarter. Architects and planners have been meeting since 2015 to decide what to do in this part of downtown, especially with what developer Rett Tucker calls the “mausoleum lobbies” of large bank towers. Plenty of people still work in those towers. It’s just that many of them never make it onto the street.
Glen Woodruff of Wittenberg, Delony & Davidson Architects told the Arkansas Times last year: “We’ve watched the street die in the sense that there’s no activity. We can be guilty of this. We drive up in the parking deck and come into our tower, and we might go downstairs for lunch or we might not. Then we’ll get back in our cars in the parking deck and drive home and literally never step on the street in downtown Little Rock.”
West of Broadway, extensive renovations have been made to what’s now being called the Frederica Hotel. It was once the Sam Peck Hotel, and the penthouse served as Rockefeller’s home for two years after he came to Arkansas in 1953. If a top-notch restaurant would move into the now-empty dining space off the lobby of that hotel, that would bring more life to that stretch of Capitol Avenue. The street should be a showplace of Arkansas. For now, it’s a bit tired.