The West Ninth Street corridor in downtown Little Rock was once considered one of the most culturally significant urban stretches in the South. (Photos provided by Quapaw Quarter Association)
Imagine walking in a downtown neighborhood clogged with pedestrians and families visiting this store or that. Retail of every description hunches next to cafes and offices as people go about their business. At night, the sound of jazz and blues pours out of doorways and floats into the street, and on Sunday, stately churches gather in congregants, some of whom are revelers from the previous night.
Such were the scenes of daily life on one of the most culturally significant urban stretches in the South, and it did not reside in Memphis or Selma or Birmingham but historic West Ninth Street, one rib of downtown Little Rock. While not much is left to speak of the corridor’s illustrious history, a new project seeks to take one important step toward resurrecting it.
An exciting new month-long demonstration, Beyond the Divide: Reconnecting West Ninth Street to the Hearts of Little Rock, is the latest effort in bringing back one of the city’s most historically and culturally
significant downtown corridors.
“The Downtown Little Rock Master Plan identified West Ninth Street as an area of focus and future development,” said Ernest Banks, architectural designer at Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects. “Historically, West Ninth Street used to be a hub of Black economic wealth and development. It is not that any longer.
Ernest Banks, Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects
“The objective is to put in place and implement transformative ideas that bring people to West Ninth Street and reactivate it into a cultural, historical and arts corridor. We’re trying to bring Black businesses back to West Ninth Street like there was historically but in a new and modern way.”
Banks is one-third of the triumvirate leadership team behind Beyond the Divide, a visionary event being produced in partnership with the nonprofit studioMAIN. The month-long demonstration project will give people a taste of how vibrant and essential the stretch of West Ninth Street between Broadway and State streets once was and could again be.
“What it truly is is a 30-day demonstration project, and by demonstration, I mean studioMAIN and other local partners are going to use quick-build techniques to transform West Ninth Street into this corridor of potential and greatness like we know it’s capable of,” Banks said.
“We are planning to actually help implement that using shipping containers to create temporary storefronts for small businesses to inhabit along West Ninth Street for this project. The containers are a very quick way to set up brick and mortar without actually having to build foundations and actual structures. We hope that will create a new West Ninth Street business model for small businesses.”
Banks is joined at the head of the project by Chloe Chapman, executive director of Our Little Rock, and Antwan Phillips, at-large city director. Funding for the event comes via a $25,000 grant from Smart Growth America and $20,000 in technical assistance from the Smart Growth America Community Connectors program. Little Rock is one of only three places nationwide to receive the grant, the others being Akron, Ohio, and Baltimore County, Maryland.
“It’s a national nonprofit organization focused on creating walkable, more accessible communities that uplift the people that live there,” Banks said. “Chloe reached out to me about this national grant opportunity that was focusing on communities across the country that have been impacted by interstate infrastructure.
“I-630 is that piece of infrastructure in terms of the history of Little Rock, and its impact is in an area of downtown that has been on the periphery and overlooked in recent years. It was just the perfect situation. We applied with the support of city director Phillips, and luckily, we received a grant.
Hugg & Hall Mobile Storage will provide much of the manpower and the shipping containers that will line the street. A growing list of other project partners includes the city of Little Rock, the Downtown Little Rock Partnership, Philander Smith University, Dunbar Historic Neighborhood Association, Velocity Graphics and the Dreamland Ballroom/Taborian Hall Museum. Another partner, the Clinton School of Public Service, will play a critical role in sustaining the momentum after the demonstration.
“We have a capstone student, Ali Dunbar, working along with us who is basically tasked with all of the postevaluation process and study for this entire project,” Banks said. “She helped us create surveys and a postevaluation plan where we’re going to create a document that will detail the impacts of this project on the community. We are going to package it in a way where it’s not just going to be delivered to the city in a report that gets shoved into a desk and is never heard from again.
“We plan on taking all the results from this project, all the feedback, all the imagery, all of the quantitative data and qualitative data and preserving that public memory on a platform that can be viewed by people long after the project is completed. Not only that — we plan on creating an implementation task force to hold the city accountable and see how we can all come together to envision what a West Ninth Street could be for the future of Little Rock.”
The demonstration, which will run the month of April, will also create a temporary gateway to the famed neighborhood to help locals better identify the confines of the district, as well as provide plenty of public art created especially for the event.
“We’re trying to bring more foot traffic to the area because, honestly, if you talk to people on the street about, ‘Hey, do you know the history of West Ninth Street in the context of Little Rock?’ 9 times out of 10, most people won’t be able to tell you what it was,” Banks said. “Even driving past it, besides the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center on the corner, you don’t really know what used to exist there.
“It’s something that this particular area of Little Rock has been needing for a long time. For so many people whose grandparents and great-grandparents used to operate on West Ninth Street, it’s something that they’ve been hoping for. By building this temporary gateway structure, it’s a monumental placemaking device that tells people, ‘Hey, this used to be the historic West Ninth Street. Welcome. Come in. Come and experience the history.”
READ ALSO: New Blood, High Expectations: Mike Preston Brings a Unique Background to CDI Contractors
