Downtown Partnership party to celebrate the ’90s
You can’t quite walk in the footsteps of the six friends on “Friends” at the Downtown Little Rock Partnership’s “’90s Mall Party” on Saturday. But you can sit where they sat.
One of the highlights of the party, 7-11 p.m. Saturday at the Main Street Mall, 101 E. Capitol Ave. at Main Street, Little Rock, is the actual couch from the TV show’s Central Perk cafe, which will be ensconced in a selfie station.
The couch was part of an exhibition called “Like It’s 1999: American Popular Culture in the 1990s,” on display from November 2019 to May 2020 at the Clinton Presidential Center. For some reason, the center hadn’t returned the furniture to whence it came, and agreed to lend it to the Downtown Partnership for the occasion.
The connection? “Clinton was the ’90s president,” explains Kyle Leyenberger, director of communications for the Downtown Little Rock Partnership.
Through the selfie station, notes decor chairwoman Katie Keck Wilson, “You are the friends of ‘Friends.’”
Because the party will feature adult beverages, attendees must be at least 21 and Leyenberger says IDs will be closely checked at the door and wristbands (how ’90s!) issued.
Why the ’90s? And why this particular venue?
The building, built as a retail mall out of what had been a row of storefronts, including a J.C. Penney’s store and Moses Melody Shop, opened in November 1987 and closed in 1989 when Main Street, which had been turned into a pedestrian-only thoroughfare, reopened to traffic. The state subsequently acquired it and turned it into an office building.
“Back in 2019 we held an ’80s mall party,” Leyenberger says, collaborating with the state to re-enhance certain aspects of the original mall, including the neon wall decorations.
“That was just a huge success, so we were planning to do another the following year,” he says, but by that point the covid-19 pandemic made holding any kind of indoor event out of the question.
“This building is naturally ’90s,” Wilson adds. And the timing is now right for a period party celebrating that particular decade.
“Any time you’re about 20 years removed from an era, you start to get nostalgia for it,” she says. She’s a ’90s kid; her niece is now getting into ’90s nostalgia, wearing ’90s-era clothes and watching ’90s-era shows. Also, adds Leyenberger, the ’90s were in many ways all about mall culture.
An MTV-style “Vee-Jay” will occupy the landing of the curving staircase that reaches from the first floor to the second, creating a video mashup visible to folks on the dance area, which will be in the space where Slick’s customers normally sit. A retro arcade, featuring ’90s-era video games, will occupy space to the building’s south side, near the escalators.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette will supply reproductions of prominent ’90s front pages, which will be posted, along with movie, TV and band posters of the time, around the mall’s first floor.
And Slick’s Grill, a short-order cafe on the mall’s ground floor, will transform for the evening into the Maxx, the hangout from the TV show “Saved by the Bell,” serving burgers and fries.
Upstairs will be the VIP area, with catered food (courtesy of Ben E. Keith) and shorter drink lines. VIPs can watch the party below.
A costume contest (“Dust off your flannel shirts and fanny packs”) will result in cash prizes for individuals and groups. Expect some ’90s “characters” to be present, in the persons of impersonators.
Wilson grew up in Fayetteville but has lived in Conway for the last 15 years. An artist by avocation, she connected with the Downtown Partnership awhile back when she painted a pair of murals for what is now the Ben E. Keith Main Street Pocket Park, 711 Main St.
When planning for this event was in its infancy, she answered an email looking for volunteers.
“I also attended that ’80s party,” she says, “and it was so much fun, I wanted to be a part of this round.”
Wilson’s employer, Natural State Recovery Centers — she’s the outreach coordinator — has contributed some money to the event, and is also sponsoring a non-alcoholic mocktail.
Careful planning by a large committee will result in making sure the event doesn’t treat the ’90s as monolithic, she says.
“The early ’90s was so different from the late ’90s,” she explains. “We worked hard to make sure there’s a little bit of everything to create a total decade.”