Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
155 and thriving
How Dickson Street changed before our eyes
When Dr. Patricia Relph and her husband, Dr. Roger D. Gross, moved to Fayetteville from the San Fernando Valley in 1980, they felt like they had really lucked out. Their friends back in California envied them moving to an area where they could buy land and build a home, especially in a state that was less polluted than their own. The two of them just thought Arkansas and Fayetteville were beautiful.
But as they became acquainted with Dickson Street, they couldn’t lump it in with the rest of the good elements of their new home. It was the corridor that led to the University of Arkansas, where Gross became the first chairman of the drama department, and Relph would work on Dickson Street every day for decades once the Walton Arts Center opened.
However, “what a poor impression Dickson Street made on me when I first began,” Relph said, recalling it on the occasion of Dickson Street’s 155th anniversary. The iconic street has long been a common meeting place for many generations in their celebrations, protests and gatherings. It was first a neighborhood, then a corridor to the University of Arkansas, a connector to the Frisco Railroad, then it became a commercial area full of businesses, bars and eventually an entertainment district.
“Coming from Los Angeles, I very clearly could see that it was dicey some of the time and that it definitely was a place that I as a woman was not going to be walking around,” Relph said. “Once it was beginning to get dark, I wasn’t going to be there.”
Relph doesn’t drink alcohol, so the many bars were of little interest to her. But she thought of Dickson Street as the path to University Theatre.
Gross’ office was in Kimpel Hall, and before the opening of the Walton Arts Center, Relph was a volunteer for the university drama department, helping put on its theater, dance, choral and opera productions. Then she started working in the music department next door to the UA Fine Arts Center.
Dickson Street was the place, after rehearsals and performances, that the artists would go for pizza or drinks. On those occasions, she would go, but always accompanied by Gross.
In that way, “I slowly began a friendship with Dickson Street,” she said and at first, it was a place to shop. “My post office was there, my drugstore was there, there were great little cafes and if I had to go fetch lunch for my spouse, I’d get him a good sandwich on Dickson Street. Or if he could get away, going to have lunch on Dickson Street would be the closest and best place to go.
“Even though it was humble, I still spent a lot of time there.”
Relph loved Flying Possum, the leather shop, where she bought custom-made sandals for herself, a hand-stamped custom belt for Roger and gifts for him and for the visiting artists they became acquainted with.
When her parents came to town or if guest artists arrived to Fayetteville, Relph would go to the Ozark Mountain Smokehouse.
“It’s ironic that since 1991 my work home and a place that I deeply love is on the corner of West and Dickson Street, the Walton Arts Center,” Relph said. Now she considers it a beautiful location in Northwest Arkansas and feels very safe there, but when she originally moved here, it was a big empty building. “If I had to be on Dickson Street, I would cross the street to not walk in front of that building. It was one of those places that was big, empty, spooky looking and I wasn’t going to get close to (it) and now it is the place where I live.”
Shortly before they moved to Northwest Arkansas, Relph and Gross, who died in 2017, got their first idea of a Dickson Street establishment by way of a feature in a big, national magazine.
“It featured a small men’s bar on Dickson Street and the name of the bar was Rogers Rec, as in recreation, Center,” Relph said. “This article claimed that Rogers Rec was ‘the center of the universe,’ that the place where all greatness, fun and good things were to be found was at Rogers Rec.”
That interested her husband, Roger, so they went together. It was a “beautiful, old-fashioned building,” a long, narrow pool hall.
“It was for beer drinkin’ and the people who were drinking there were truck drivers, utility workers, college students — you know, the city forklift driver — and playing pool,” Relph said. Artist friends sometimes liked to go, but it certainly wasn’t a ladies’ place. “In a way, Dickson Street seemed like kind of a guys’ street.”
In the ’80s Dickson Street on Friday and Saturday nights had a similar dynamic to what it does now, she said, with the youthful activity of going down to Dickson Street being, for women, to dress up and look fabulous, to go to a bar and meet someone new.
Of course, that sort of activity has always incited judgment from certain circles.
Relph had seen street demonstrators in Los Angeles and in London’s Hyde Park, but she found that the street demonstrators on Dickson Street were very aggressive.
“They were kind of in-yourface thrusting a religious theme at you very aggressively,” she said. The demonstrators’ signs were emblazoned with phrases like “You are going to hell.” “I remember hearing them shout words like ‘whore’ and ‘whore monger,’ and in a public place, that was quite shocking to me.”
Relph understood it represented a sort of freedom of speech, but she also counted it as one of those roughneck attributes of Dickson Street. But still, that too goes on.
A new chapter came with the ’90s, Relph said, as the performing arts center began to be built, and a need for improvements to Dickson Street started to be seen as crucial by multiple entities.
WINTER PARK IN THE ROUGH
Bootsie Ackerman and her late husband, Bill Ackerman, moved from Winter Park, Fla., where they had lived for many years, to Northwest Arkansas in 1992, at the same time that the Walton Arts Center opened.
“Dickson Street was such an unusual place at that time,” Ackerman said. “Nothing had happened much as far as revitalization down there.”
As she and her husband stood on Dickson and looked up and down it, they recognized it for its many similar elements of Winter Park. The Florida town was known as a trendy place to go for arts festivals and entertainment. Its Park Avenue at the time ran off a campus of Stetson University; it had a train depot, a music scene, shopping and restaurants.
“I said, ‘You know, it’s just Winter Park in the rough,’” Ackerman recalled. She just felt like it could be so much more than it was. “I wanted it to be a vibrant, fun, nice place to spend time … a place people wanted to go for entertainment and shopping.”
Dickson Street did have a rich history as a neighborhood of shops — Town and Country was on the downtown square and another dress shop was Matilda’s. Campbell’s Department Store was around in ’92, but closed its doors soon after she arrived. JC Penney and a movie theater were on the square, too.
Collier’s Drugstore was on Dickson then as now, the Farmer’s Market has always remained a steady draw for downtown, and Dickson Street was home to the music scene and university community. Those things remain the same.
Ackerman soon learned that many other people had hopes to improve Dickson Street, but for various reasons none of them were panning out. They weren’t comprehensive enough, didn’t harness all the business owners’ efforts together or have an appointed leader to keep the many players on track.
Bootsie got involved in the community through the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce, where she served on a committee that explored ways to connect Fayetteville’s downtown square with Dickson Street.
The endeavor had been attempted many times, most notably by Jim Foster, who had assembled detailed plans and timelines, and architect Laleh Amirmoez, who worked together on a committee, but it was never executed.
Among the failed attempts at improvement were imposing a tax on property owners to build parking for the Dickson Street areas, which ended in a lawsuit. When business owners there pooled their money to put toward planting trees, putting up lights and improving parking, it took a less than nuanced approach.
“They went down there and just chunked out holes in the sidewalk and planted trees,” Ackerman said with a laugh. “Check! Needless to say it wasn’t very successful.”
Instrumental in getting a new plan off the ground was the success of building the Walton Arts Center. It gave momentum to the acknowledged need for improvements, and the Downtown Dickson Enhancement Project was created in 1997. The nonprofit organization would facilitate those changes by working closely with Fayetteville city government and with the help of the University of Arkansas.
Main Street Arkansas, an advocate for downtown revitalization, was one of the considered options for making big changes on Dickson Street, but Ackerman felt that working independently would allow greater freedom in the execution of the project. Being on the edge of the college campus and the UA Community Design Center having recently moved right off the square meant she was keenly aware of the resources available within arm’s reach.
Students of the UA design center created a conceptual design for improvements to the downtown area, and Ackerman advocated strongly that all funding available be put behind it. Asa Hutchinson was congressman at the time, and his office secured an earmark in the federal highway transportation bill for the project, which put $1.5 million on the table.
“That got everyone’s attention, that’s when it began to take shape,” Ackerman said. The idea was to save the visual look of Dickson Street, while upgrading and modernizing it and building up restaurants and retail. “The most important aspect in a lot of plans was that there were living quarters over them, bringing people downtown to live there.”
Once more people could live downtown, Ackerman was sure the activity and pride in the area would increase.
While the project succeeded in the end, it was not without its challenges beyond funding.
Some folks did already live in the Dickson Street area, and those who did complained the project was gentrification in action and the old neighborhood would be pushed out. Many argued that parking issues must be solved first, but Ackerman was sure that raising the quality of offerings should instead come first.
“If you have something people want to come to, they’ll park up a tree and walk a mile to get to you,” she said. New parking would be more feasible once the need was greater, since garages and other solutions are such expensive structures to build. “You’ve got to have down here what people want.”
Tapping into more than 100-year-old infrastructure was a messy affair too. Breaking up sidewalks on Dickson Street led to the discovery of a creek flowing beneath the street. Each surprise meant delays in the work’s completion, making Ackerman’s primary job to remind merchants that the headaches would be worth it eventually, even as access to their storefronts were cut off or entrance made difficult, and assuring residents that a “rising tide lifts all ships.”
“They just didn’t want change,” Ackerman said of the locals’ worries. “They were afraid it would lose the live music vibe and the feeling that it had.”
Then there was occasional tension with the city, the project pressuring the local government to pitch in with enhancements to public spaces and the differences that took place with changes in mayors. Eventually Fayetteville did take over the construction aspect. Meanwhile the nonprofit roped in help from the marketing, landscape architecture and business departments of UA.
With their academic helpers, solutions cost generally less, and they were able to incorporate new-to-the-market things, like a rocky mixture that kept roots from tearing up sidewalks. They took pride in the practical design elements, like flower beds with marble topped walls that could act as benches for the parades and other public events.
The Downtown Dickson Enhancement Project hoped that the result would be families coming to Dickson Street to walk and enjoy it and find entertainment, and it had a ribbon cutting for the improved area in 2000 or 2001.
“It was a real transitional period for the street,” Ackerman said. “It really changed the dynamics of the whole downtown.”
This series will continue with a history of George’s Majestic Lounge on Dec. 14 and an even further look back on the street’s many phases on Dec. 21.
April Wallace is Associate Features Editor — Our Town, Profiles, Religion — and can be reached by email at awallace@nwaonline.com or on X @NWAApril.