Posted on 01/06/2003 5:52:26 AM PST by TLBSHOW
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. Jan. 6 — Suddenly, downtown Little Rock is booming.
Concrete and steel now rise at the foot of newly named President Clinton Avenue, where the Clinton Presidential Center is scheduled to open next year. The center's construction, with its $160 million price tag, has also spurred commitments for $700 million in other downtown projects.
Little Rock developer Rett Tucker said property values in the area have doubled since 1998, the year after Bill Clinton said he would build his library here. An area once boarded up and written off as a warehouse wasteland has become the booming River Market district, dotted with hotels, restaurants, bars and shops.
Clinton's aim to use his presidential library to transform a world beset with racial and religious strife is already benefiting a city once equated with bigotry and segregation, developers and proponents said.
"What the Clinton library has created is a domino effect," Tucker said.
Clinton project manager Jonathan Semans said the transformation is cause for celebration.
"For the casual viewer, it will become much more exciting from now on ... because the building will become more of a reality," he said.
Forty-five years ago, Little Rock was an international symbol of intolerance. After Gov. Orval Faubus directed National Guard troops to keep nine black children out of Little Rock Central High School, President Eisenhower sent in federal troops to enforce a court's integration order.
The event came to symbolize the beginning of the federal government's commitment to desegregation. Clinton plans to build on that model, and develop ways to bridge boundaries worldwide, with his museum and academic complex.
In 12 years as Arkansas governor and eight years as president, Clinton constantly courted the black community. In the White House, he set up a number of offices and panels to improve race relations and made a number of trips to Africa and has since set up an office in Harlem.
He now is so highly revered among blacks that he recently became the first non-black recognized as an honorary inductee to the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame. Author Toni Morrison once described him as "our first black president."
Library planners say they are excited to be part of Little Rock's renewal.
"Clinton may have left the presidency but he didn't leave the public's interest," Clinton Foundation president Skip Rutherford added. "There's just enormous interest in this guy and all of that is good for the library. In large part, it's been a key factor in transforming the city."
Rutherford said most of the money being spent on the $160 million construction project is going into Arkansas' economy with the use of local workers.
"And that doesn't count the economic impact of $10.7 million a year after the library is built," he said.
The Clinton Presidential Center will also be surrounded by a city park on the 28-acre site.
"When this thing is completed, we're going to have one of the finest urban parks in the country, in a world where urban sprawl is dominating cities," Rutherford said.
Sharon Fawcett, the National Archives deputy for presidential libraries, has said no other presidential library has intentionally focused on helping to stem urban sprawl by associating with the revitalization of a downtown area.
"We didn't want to be a single source destination in the middle of a field somewhere," Rutherford said. "We wanted to be part of the community."
Library planners and city officials hope Little Rock's transformation will be aided not only with the Clinton library, but with Heifer Project International, a Little Rock-based charity that plans to open a global village and new headquarters near the Clinton site. Acxiom Corp., a leading database management company, is also moving its headquarters downtown from a site up the Arkansas River.
Rutherford said the foundation expects to see 300,000 visitors to the library in its first year of operation.
City Manager Bruce Moore said he envisions a different Little Rock in years to come, anchored by the Clinton library. He sees a greater focus on "mixed-use development" in downtown and midtown and more of an emphasis on balanced growth a move away from urban sprawl.
"For the first time in the last 50 years we've seen an increase in population ... mainly in the downtown area," Moore said.
He said the Clinton park and the Heifer project will breath life into downtown.
"You're basically going to have a 50-acre park sitting in downtown Little Rock," Moore said. "You start envisioning things like Central Park right here in downtown."
That must be Hillary's museum.
Go to Little Rock, where you can be robbed, raped or Murdered on President Clinton Street? Somehow, I don't think it'll be as much of a tourist draw as Graceland and Beale Street in nearby Memphis.
White dot on a black background?
Little Rock's transformation will be aided not only with the Clinton library, but with Heifer Project International. . . .Or where they recruit the library interns.That must be Hillary's museum.
-Eric
Perhaps we could bus all of the homeless from our respective states there.Now there's an idea.
Seems the appropriate person to head this project !...
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