Signs of life

Momentum at the piney woods’ edge

DOWN where the piney woods meet the Delta, where the row crops rise into tall timber, more signs of life are stirring.

Pine Bluff is getting a new Courtyard by Marriott in the old hotel space at the city’s convention center. While such news might represent just another headline in the business section, for Pine Bluff and southeast Arkansas, this is big news.

The old Plaza Hotel at the Pine Bluff Convention Center has been closed for years, and an empty hotel attached to your venue doesn’t exactly scream “Bring your act here.” What once served as the state’s premier concert and event venue doesn’t draw like it did in the 1970s when Elvis and Bob Hope were playing sold-out shows. On back-to-back nights, even.

But after decades of slow and steady decline,

Pine Bluff is showing signs of renewal. Saracen Casino Resort is up and running and close to finishing out its full vision, and the once nationally prestigious King Cotton Holiday Classic high school basketball tournament is back.

Marriott has signed a 30-year deal to manage the hotel, the Pine Bluff Commercial tells us. The five-story 200-room building that housed the old Wilson World and Plaza hotels will be demolished and a 120-room Courtyard and bistro built in its place.

The project carries an estimated $20 million to $22 million price tag—financing for which is expected to be completed by next quarter—as well as an early 2024 estimated completion date, the paper reports.

City officials in recent years had attempted to draw postseason college basketball to the convention center. But the Division 1 Southwestern Athletic Conference, of which the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff is a member, and the Division 2 Great American Conference, home to six Arkansas schools including the nearby UA-Monticello, each cited lack of adequate lodging.

City officials now believe that won’t be an issue anymore. Ryan Watley, CEO of the Go Forward group, called the news a win for Pine Bluff.

Pre-1990, before the steady decline that hobbled it, Pine Bluff arguably was the state’s second city, its civic lieutenant governor. Northwest Arkansas was not yet a thing and Fort Smith, bless its heart, seemed to sit literally and otherwise on the periphery of state business and politics. On the frontier, as it were.

Pine Bluff, meanwhile, just 40 miles down old U.S. 65 from Little Rock, was the de facto Delta capital. And agriculture remained the state’s calling card.

The Pine Bluff Zebras represented one of the state’s largest high schools and annually competed with Little Rock Central for state titles. It produced Razorback athletes (sometimes even Sooners) on the regular, and the Pine Bluff Convention Center was the state’s hot gathering spot.

Let that sink in. Through the ’70s and much of there ’80s, the state’s sparkling new state-of-the-art event venue was in . . . Pine Bluff. Not only Elvis, but Eric Clapton and Aerosmith-in-its-prime played Pine Bluff. The Razorback basketball team played a game or two in Pine Bluff for much of the ’70s and ’80s, and the convention center hosted one of the biggest wins in program history. Play-by-play of the Hogs’ 65-64 win over then-No. 1 North Carolina, led by a notable freshman whose initials are MJ, is recited as canon among Hog fans of a certain age. The game was televised nationally on a Sunday by NBC—back when one, maybe two televised games a weekend was all you got—and called by the legendary broadcasting team of Dick Enberg and Al McGuire.

In the ’80s, the King Cotton was considered one of the nation’s most prestigious high school basketball tournaments, drawing teams from around the country and future NBA players (and in some cases, future Hogs) such as Corliss Williamson, Jason Kidd, Joe Johnson, Bobby Hurley, even Desmond Howard, who would go on to win the Heisman Trophy playing football at Michigan.

Eventually, as farms required fewer hands and residents chased jobs, Pine Bluff became a shell of its former self. The city, which topped out at 57,400 residents in the 1970 census, treaded water for two decades before the decline set in. It’s lost people each census since, and now is home to a 2020 count of just over 41,000.

Once the state’s third-largest city—it even got a mention from ’70s bombshell Suzanne Somers on “Three’s Company”—Pine Bluff has fallen out of the top 10.

The Marriott flag planted at the convention center should bolster revitalization efforts already underway in downtown Pine Bluff, once home to the state’s first TV station and still home to Simmons Bank’s corporate HQ.

But over the decades on any given weekday, downtown could resemble the set of a zombie apocalypse movie. Those days, it appears, are over.

Momentum seems to be on Pine Bluff’s side—Saracen, King Cotton’s return, and now a brand-name hotel back at the convention center. That signals a potential return to prominence, or at least something like it, down where the piney woods meet the Delta.