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Judge acts to stop bogus tax credit scheme
12/29/2011

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 28 (UPI) -- A federal judge has ordered a California man to stop promoting what the U.S. Justice Department calls a scheme to sell billions of dollars in bogus tax credits. The Justice Department said in a release Wednesday that Lam...

Online Poker Could Be Legal Under Ruling
12/29/2011

WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- A decision by the U.S. Department of Justice could make online lotteries and online poker legal, analysts say. In reinterpreting the Wire Act of 1961, the department ruled the law's banning of wagers by way of telecomm

Low-flying on real wheels
12/28/2011

The Observer owns a bicycle now for the first time in 20 years or more, the first one since the mountain bikes of our troubled youth. We've been riding The Going Nowhere bike at the gym since August, and have been making noises about our desire for a Going Somewhere bike for months now. Probably just to call our bluff, Spouse bought us one for our X-mas present: a shiny black cruiser that looks like it's going a million miles an hour just sitting on the kickstand.

She's apparently had it hoarded up in her office for a good two weeks now, fending off the advances of 40-something children who wanted to take it for a spin down her hallway.

Sorry, dudes. It's ours now. And, as all bikers and fans of "Sons of Anarchy" know: You never sit on another man's bike.

Three days before Christmas, she sprung the gift on us by way of a photo on her phone. Her office is only six or seven blocks away from The Fortress of Employment, so last rainy Thursday, a bit giddy at the prospect of gliding along on two wheels again, we walked down to claim it.

She'd neglected to include a helmet with her gift, so the last thing she said to her One and Only as we wheeled the new machine away from her office was not to ride it without a helmet, and especially not in the rain, because a funeral might put a damper on end-of- year parties. We couldn't resist, though. Half a block from her office, we saddled up and just sat there awhile, waiting for the frame to snap in half under our weight. Then we put a foot on a pedal and kicked off.

After a wobbly start, one back hoof dangling in the air and searching for the other pedal, we found it. Suddenly, we were in the wind. It was a crawl, really, but to us it felt like flying: the wind in our face and the rain prickling on our skin.

We crossed streets, looking both ways for the 9 a.m. drunk who would appear and cut us down, buzzing along in the open stretches with the padded seat nestled comfortably into our padded posterior. It was, in a word, glorious.

There are certain things that — if the writer was a creator of fiction — nobody would buy if we made 'em up. Just as we pulled up in front of the Arkansas Times offices and coasted to a stop, we heard a rattle and a sickening crash. We turned, and saw a delivery truck standing in the middle of the Scott and Markham intersection. Nearby was a crunched motorcycle, the bike pilot still dazed on the ground.

Forgetting about shiny paint, we dropped our new bicycle on the sidewalk and rushed over to him as he picked himself up, pulled off his nicked helmet, and had some choice words for the driver. We helped the biker stand his machine up, then stood and looked at it, the bike's red plastic faring broken and forlorn, the seat spun six feet away in the rain. We couldn't help but imagine what kind of shape we would have been in had it been us who fell under the bumper of the behemoth.

Thankfully, the motorcyclist was OK. There's a lot of motorcycle accidents that don't end so well, we know. It sure enough gave this new/old bicyclist some pause.

Be careful out there, two-wheelers. Wear your helmet and keep the tread side down.

On second thought, maybe we'll confine our low-flying to the River Trail. There's no delivery trucks to round a corner and flatten us on the Big Dam Bridge, and besides: when the Universe sends you a message that clear, you damn sure better listen.

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SoMa peeks over the hump
12/28/2011

When I first moved to the Quapaw Quarter in 1997, the question asked by friends and acquaintances was "Is it safe down there?" by Jay Barth

When I first moved to the Quapaw Quarter in 1997, the question asked by friends and acquaintances was "Is it safe down there?" Understandable just a few years after the height of the 23rd Street Crips, the question became more and more detached from reality years after the gang battles had receded.

Over time, that question was replaced by another one: "I love the architecture down there, but where do you shop for groceries?" For over a decade, there was no good answer "down there" to that, a pretty fundamental one for a livable neighborhood. The Harvest Foods store at 17th and Main was slow to be replaced after a deadly tornado destroyed it in 1999 and when it returned it was perhaps the grimiest grocery store in the first world. Long-time downtown residents all have a story about giving the store one more chance only to witness a food felony in the store's produce section.

A couple of years ago, downtown residents got a better answer to the grocery store question. The demise of the Harvest Foods chain presented an opportunity for the Edwards family to open a Food Giant in that space. "The Meat People" (as is their slogan) do a bit more for those with a penchant for pork parts than vegetarians like me. In dramatic contrast to Harvest Foods, however, the store is tidy and well stocked and the staff is incredibly friendly and responsive to requests. (After they began carrying hummus when I asked for it, I felt a need to buy the item every time I entered the store whether I needed it or not.) The arrival of Food Giant came at a time that the SoMa (South Main) neighborhood showed real promise of finally getting over the hump and becoming a stable living and retail area driven not by gentrification but instead by a racially and economically diverse population like that seen at Food Giant on any weeknight after work.

Over the 15 years I've lived downtown, the neighborhood has, again and again, seemingly been on the cusp of that status, exceptional for urban living in Central Arkansas. There were signs of real promise following the end of the gang wars when I arrived in 1997, but the January 1999 tornado ripped the neighborhood apart, destroying numerous homes and creating a wasteland east of Main Street. In the first decade of the 21st century, the post-9/11 recession and the attention focused on the River Market area delayed additional progress in the area. After the River Market had become vibrant, there were repeated rumors that the Stephens family or some other investor was about to make the move to bring housing and retail down Main Street north of I-630, creating an opportunity for the area south of I-630 to connect across the interstate that divides the capital city. Nothing has come of those big ideas — the street remains pretty desolate at night between the freeway and the marvelous island that is the Arkansas Repertory Theatre. The SoMa neighborhood came to realize it couldn't rely upon financier Warren Stephens to stretch development down to it; it would have to generate development itself.

Although less marked than Argenta's recent progress, the last three years have shown steady progress for SoMa. First, Paul Page Dwellings began building contemporary structures on empty lots east of Main Street, providing an option for younger residents unable to afford the large old homes to the west and providing growth on both sides of the Main Street corridor. While originally annoying to Quapaw residents with a love for Victorians and Craftsmans, slowly the stylish modern homes have come to be seen as filling a crucial niche in the neighborhood.

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The Pettaway Park neighborhood, an older African-American community east of Main and north of Roosevelt that had been a center of gang activity in the 1990s, has shown clear signs of stabilizing, aided by the building of new affordable homes by the Downtown Little Rock Community Development Corporation.

After years of design battles with the various regulatory bodies that oversee the area's architecture, a new pharmacy — almost as crucial as a grocery store to a healthy neighborhood — arrived when USA Drug built an excellent new store just to the north of Food Giant.

Just as importantly, Anita Davis began investing in the 1400 block of Main Street, creating the gorgeous and funky Bernice Garden on the corner of Main and Daisy Gatson Bates streets and the commercial spaces along the block, including the Green Store with its cool recycled gadgets and goods and the newest outpost of Boulevard Bakery, whose arrival was a crucial psychological boost for the neighborhood. A Saturday morning at Boulevard is now a meeting space for neighbors to connect with each other about happenings in the Quapaw. Across the street, the innovative Root Cafe creates another stellar lunch option in the neighborhood and shows promise to become an outstanding dinner option in the coming months. All told, that block has some of the same feel as Austin's hippie chic South Congress area.

November's Cornbread Festival, sponsored by the Bernice Garden, exemplified the spirit of the neighborhood. The first annual event was a success in the traditional sense, outpacing expectations in terms of the sheer number of attendees. But, the event was more remarkable in its generational and racial diversity; indeed, it is perhaps the most diverse social event I've attended in Little Rock in recent years. In a racially divided city, such signs of line-crossing should be celebrated, and a neighborhood where that can happen represents the best hope for eroding the deep divisions that mark our community. As the Quapaw Quarter Association's recently completed community branding project states, "Named to honor those who once lived here, we celebrate a unique diversity that creates history every day."

The other public space in Little Rock in which such diversity shows itself regularly is Community Bakery, the combination of old-style bakery and cafe that has served as an anchor for the neighborhood in good times and bad. Long-time owner Joe Fox, who moved the bakery to the corner space in the mid-1990s and created the cafe, a daily gathering place for lawyers, politicians, retirees and students of all races, is dedicated to employing neighborhood residents who often find it difficult to locate jobs.

A block away sits the recently abandoned Juanita's restaurant and music space. The neighborhood worried as rumors spread of nightclubs and other less desirable tenants for the large building. Instead, news that Oxford American magazine would relocate its administrative offices (and, in the years ahead, possibly much more) to the space only accelerated energy in the neighborhood. More than just one of the nation's most extraordinary magazines, but also a brand dedicated to promoting Southern culture in all forms under the leadership of publisher Warwick Sabin, the Oxford American's move significantly enhances the neghborhood's building momentum.

At a time when more and more Americans are looking for urban spaces in which to create more sustainable lives, SoMa shows promise to become the magnet for urban living in Central Arkansas. Starting in the 1960s, a generation of folks came to the Quapaw to save the gorgeous variety of residential structures threatened by destruction through indifference. Their good works — in the form of renovated American Foursquares, Victorian cottages, and mansions with Italian Renaissance touches — remain as a testament to their care. But, the homes themselves are now populated by a combination of those urban pioneers of the past and a new generation (many with children in strollers) who have arrived to care for the homes. The attendees of the monthly Quapaw Quarter Home and Garden Club dinners (where gardening is never on the agenda) are now a mix of those who have lived in the area for decades and new arrivals with the same dedication to preserving the fabric of the neighborhood. New faces moving into old homes is a sign of success in Quapaw.

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Despite this progress, obvious voids show themselves in the commercial life of the neighborhood. The departure of Juanita's leaves the neighborhood without a dinner option after Community Bakery closes at 8 p.m. Three or four dinner venues are crucial so that residents don't have to drive anytime they want to eat out. There's no bank (and, indeed, no ATM) available to residents. And, while the E-Z Mart and Food Giant have surprisingly good beer selections, there's not a place to buy a nice bottle of wine for miles.

For SoMa to finally get over the hump and become the vibrant space that many have long thought it could be, it will have to continue to grow itself (in dramatic contrast with Argenta, its closest parallel). There are no signs that major outside investments will swoop in to do wholesale renovations of blocks of South Main Street, city government is at best indifferent to the area's interests, and the perception that the area is "unsafe" remains the basis of realtors' avoidance of the area with prospective buyers. Despite these obstacles, SoMa may gradually — and finally — be creating the space from which a gritty, diverse version of Little Rock's urban core can be reborn.

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Argenta: Revival on Main Street
12/28/2011

Old houses with tons of character. Local shops with locally-produced goods. Neighborhood bars and restaurants run by your neighbors. Dedicated trails for biking and walking. by Eric Francis

Old houses with tons of character. Local shops with locally-produced goods. Neighborhood bars and restaurants run by your neighbors. Dedicated trails for biking and walking. A spectacular skyline view —

Up until that last bit, you might have been talking about the Hillcrest neighborhood in Little Rock. But hugging the north bank of the Arkansas River in downtown North Little Rock, the Argenta neighborhood has been making the case for being one of the trendiest places to live and play hereabouts — and with no small success.

Anchored by a revived Main Street with its historic buildings still intact (a number of them renovated), this dense, urban neighborhood dates back to the early 20th century. West of Main you'll find about 16 blocks of houses — a fraction the size of many Little Rock neighborhoods, to be sure — many of them Craftsman in style and some quite spectacular. (The 1895 E.O. Manees House on Fourth Street, home to the Junior League of North Little Rock, is the belle dame, but even the more modest homes have touches like stylish architecture, built-in cabinetry with leaded glass and original windows and woodwork.) Plus, the whole area is protected by a local ordinance historic district that requires buildings to maintain a historically correct exterior.

It's not terribly hard to see why Argenta, a neighborhood that also boasts Dickey-Stephens Park, Verizon Arena and the the Millenium Trail along the river, attracts homeowners.

As recently as five years ago, the easiest way to buy in Argenta was to know someone who already lived there. Word that a neighbor was thinking about moving invariably resulted in a race to see who could call one of their house-hunting friends first with the news, and sales were often closed without the house ever actually being put on the market. In fact, that's exactly how I bought my Argenta home.

One of the most telling things about the state of Argenta today is that people are putting a sign in their lawn when they want to sell their house. Realtor and FSBO signs now appear in front yards and turnover is slower; houses can stay on the market for weeks or months. Part of that is due to the terrible nature of the national economy and the fact that banks are still loan-shy. But it's also true that there are fewer and fewer houses in Argenta that you can get at bargain prices, even if they're fixer-uppers. Property owners understand the value inherent in those structures.

But Becky Ragsdale, president of Argenta Neighborhood Boosters, says, "I think we're actually doing well at the under $200,000 range."

Ragsdale is a former Floridian who lives with her husband, Bob, in a rehabbed brick Craftsman on Sixth Street. Sitting at her dining room table, she quickly ticks off recent sales in the neighborhood.

"There's the brick rent house in the 700 block of Willow; the duplex condo; the Dutch Colonial sold on the day of its first open house; and the Fire Department's inspector bought the house at Seventh and Orange."

The so-called "duplex condo" — more like two good-sized houses with a shared entry porch — was significant because it's the first new-home construction in Argenta in more than a decade, and was a high-dollar sale to boot. The last time anyone built from scratch in Argenta was Habitat for Humanity back in the '90s — and that house, which is next door to mine, also sold recently.

"I think overall, if something's for sale in the neighborhood, it's selling," she said. "That's pretty good."

Today, she estimates, houses are selling in the $100 to $105 per square foot range. One of my friends in the neighborhood actually tracks home prices and tells me that from 1994 to 2001 the increase, on average, was 400 percent. Case in point: Her own home, which was acquired by the Argenta Community Development Corporation for less than $15,000 in the early '90s, cost her $40,000 in 2001, and today she's selling it for $150,000.

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Indeed, 10 years ago the Argenta CDC was doing a lot to drive the real estate market here as it bought up neglected properties and bought out landlords. As prices followed the upward trend of property values, many people who'd hung on for years in Argenta decided to cash out, which drew bargain hunters and do-it-yourselfers. But once the resurrection of Argenta became self-sustaining, the CDC wasn't needed as the primary house rehabilitator anymore.

Ragsdale sits on the CDC board and acknowledges that the economy is prompting the nonprofit to change its focus some. For example, a large, mixed-use residential and commercial project proposed for the 700 block of Main Street that was highly touted just a few years ago is now off the table. "We're trying to sell our property there," Ragsdale said.

But, she said, the need for entry-level affordable housing is still being met in the area, this time just west of Argenta. "There's a lot of growth and development in Baring Cross. It makes me very hopeful."

Thinking big about Argenta's future is The Argenta Downtown Council, another nonprofit development agency, which has made its bid to be the provider of vision for the area. Established by developer John Gaudin and staffed by some of the area's most familiar names — former Twin City Bank exec Donna Hardcastle is the executive director, and long-time Argenta resident Don Chambers is the general manager — the ADC has produced a master plan for the neighborhood. The most sweeping changes it shows are concentrated in the area between Main Street and Interstate 30. That stretch, generally known as East Argenta, has long been the redheaded stepsibling of Argenta proper. Other than the construction of Verizon (nee Alltel) Arena back in the '90s, it has been left almost entirely untouched by the nearly 20-year rehabilitation trend the area west of Main has enjoyed.

Gaudin has good reason to want to see a second Argenta renaissance east of Main: He owns a whole lot of property there and has spoken often of the potential for this part of the neighborhood. An advocate and practicer of New Urbanism (he lives smack on the corner of Main and Broadway above Cregeen's Irish Pub, in a building he built and owns), Gaudin has already put his money where his mouth is by developing the CityGrove townhouses along Maple Street. He would love to see the area east of Main reborn as the Mill District, an homage to the old Mountaire Feed Mill at Fourth and Poplar streets that he bought and tore down.

But the big picture again intrudes. Just as the national real estate bust cooled the rate of home sales in Argenta, it put the brakes on Gaudin's initial plan to expand CityGrove along another couple of blocks of Maple. Likewise, there's not much movement toward realizing the Mill District plan; in fact, Gaudin has placed a number of properties in the neighborhood on the market, including the former mill site itself. The Argenta Downtown Council has asserted, though, that it would be happy to work with new owners interested in taking part in the master plan.

While the gentrification of East Argenta still remains a dream, west of Main Street they're living a lifestyle that wouldn't seem out of place in Hillcrest. The Third Friday Argenta ArtWalks see crowds up and down Main, perusing artworks under shade pavilions and listening to live music, popping into galleries and shops that take advantage of the extra foot traffic. Argenta Market has been a major boon to residents who don't like the 20-minute round trip to the Levy Kroger to get just one thing — and who don't mind paying small-store premium prices. And with six bars and restaurants in a two-block stretch drawing diners from a wide swath of the socio-economic scale, finding a bite to eat is never a chore.

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"We've got a neighborhood for all age groups," says Ragsdale. "Activities for the young, family stuff, the park, bars, the River Market a trolley ride away. And for retirees, they can walk to the grocery store or the drug store."

That walkability, she adds, is one of the best things about Argenta — not just the quiet streets and the nearby River Trail, but the fact there's someplace to go, like the farmer's market (in season) and the grocery store.

"Sometimes we walk to the [Argenta] Market two or three times a day," she admitted.

So what's missing?

"We need more shops," Ragsdale said. "A Ten Thousand Villages, a Hallmark, more retail. That would draw more people in. Look at downtown Conway — all those little shops."

Indeed, there are spaces to fill on Main Street, where some storefronts have remained stubbornly empty over the years; that's been one of the great frustrations for the partisans in Argenta. Ragsdale notes there's been an uptick in crime lately, though the overall rate in Argenta is still low. Walmart's plan to open one of its Neighborhood Market grocery stores in Riverdale — not too far a drive on Cantrell — could be detrimental to Argenta Market. Plus, the uncertainty of the master plan's fate means nobody knows when the next wave of investment needed to draw in even more residents and businesses will happen.

Still, in the grand scheme of neighborhood problems, Argenta's pretty well off.

"I think the neighborhood overall is stable," said Ragsdale. "I think we've held our own in this economic crunch better than many, many neighborhoods. I think Argenta is attractive to a lot of people. We have homes here small enough to support your lifestyle. You can walk to everything you need."

And, when you get right down to it, lots of good neighbors.

"We're like a little San Francisco here," Ragsdale said of the live-and-let-live attitude she sees pervading Argenta. "You can be of any political persuasion, any sexual orientation, white or black or polka dot, and people just don't care."

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Coming clean
12/28/2011

It's hard for us, as it would be for any well-intentioned person, but some commendation is due the three Republican congressmen from Arkansas.

It's hard for us, as it would be for any well-intentioned person, but some commendation is due the three Republican congressmen from Arkansas. In a moment of candor — a rare one — U.S. Reps. Rick Crawford, Tim Griffin and Steve Womack have all admitted publicly that they're not opposed to higher taxes as such, only to higher taxes on rich people and big corporations — that is, the sort of people who contribute generously to the representatives' political campaigns, and to their party. (The three agree with the Supreme Court that corporations are people, only slightly more deserving than the average.)

Like the famous baseball triad of Tinker to Evers to Chance, Crawford and Griffin and Womack are capable of inflicting considerable pain on the opposition, which in their case is the working people of America. They just haven't been in the game as long as the Cub infielders were.

The Arkansas congressmen had professed repeatedly, tiresomely, their opposition to higher taxes in general. Yet when the time came to vote on a tax increase for millions of middle-class Americans, all three dropped the duplicity and voted to stick it to the working stiffs. Crawford, Griffin and Womack joined their fellow teabaggers in support of legislation to increase the payroll taxes on workers, and to cut unemployment benefits for those who've lost their jobs. Here's truth in government for you, harsh truth. (How cruel to the common man would they have been were it not the Christmas season? Repealed the child-labor laws, maybe. Closed the public schools.)

It now appears that House Republicans, including the Arkansas Three, have been forced to back down by the White House and public opinion, and that they will reluctantly accept delay in the proposed payroll-tax increase and unemployment-benefit decrease. Delay, but not surrender. The Arkansas congressmen have shed their lambs' clothing and enlisted in the raging class warfare for the duration. They'll still be dedicated enemies of the common people, but they'll be fighting out in the open, their malice visible to all. This new honesty may give them problems sleeping. Class war is hell.

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Republicans cave
12/28/2011

It turns out that there is a limit to the oldest cynical political strategy — saying one thing, doing the opposite and then claiming credit for both. The holiday cave-in by House Republicans demonstrates it. by Ernest Dumas

All year long, led by its congressional freshman class and Tea-Party wing, the party talked about the plight of middle-class families while voting for the rich and corporations, talked about economic growth while voting to stymie it, and proclaimed its dedication to low taxes while scheming to let them go up, at least for working people.

The strategy became unglued Christmas week when the House had to capitulate to President Obama and the Senate, with considerable damage to the party and its election prospects, which was opposite to its purpose. The strategy was supposed to do in President Obama, who had cooperated with the Republican strategy all year long until the Christmas season.

Our Arkansas members of Congress played a small and unproud role.

Let it be said that few Republicans actually think that working people ought to pay a lot more taxes, although the party seemed to embrace that idea last summer when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and the party's leading presidential candidate at the time, Michele Bachmann, complained that almost half of Americans — the poorest half — were skating by and paying no federal taxes. The statistic was not even close to being correct although it was true that the Obama tax cuts in 2009 left 47 percent of Americans, including the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed and people with very low take-home pay, owing no federal income taxes for 2009 and 2010 but paying plenty other taxes.

Soon after taking office, Obama got Congress to temporarily reduce taxes for Social Security and Medicare to put more money into people's pockets and help spend the country out of recession, a proven trick for the past 80 years. But after the devastating 2010 election, Obama could not get Republicans to go along with extending the low payroll taxes until he agreed not to restore taxes on the rich to their 2001 levels. Obama's own party was furious at his surrender. He had campaigned on the promise to close the federal budget deficit by restoring taxes on high incomes and closing corporate tax loopholes.

Then in August House Republicans and the filibuster faction in the Senate threatened to shutter the government and plunge the nation into bankruptcy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. Arkansas's three Republican congressmen, Rick Crawford, Tim Griffin and Steve Womack, were in the vanguard. Crawford declared that he would not vote to raise the debt ceiling and incur a dime's more debt. But Obama agreed to a deal with Republican leaders in the House and Senate. In exchange for his dropping a plan to restore slightly higher taxes on millionaires and agreeing to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits and other programs in the future, they raised the debt ceiling through the end of 2012. Our men changed their votes, too.

So the expectation was that the president would fold anytime his back was to the wall. With the lower payroll taxes expiring this week, Obama wanted Congress to extend the low rates a while longer to avert the country's sliding back into recession. Some 160 million Americans — more than 1.5 million of them in Arkansas — would see their 2012 take-home pay fall by an average of $1,000.

Nowadays, Congress is supposed to pay for these things by raising taxes somewhere else or cutting spending. Obama wanted to pay for it with a temporary surtax on multimillionaires. In Arkansas, fewer than 2,500 people, those with adjusted net incomes over $1 million in 2012, would pay 2.1 percent more in taxes so that some 1.5 million would keep a little more of their wages.

The House balked. Republicans in the Senate worked out a deal with the president and Democrats to continue the tax cuts and extended unemployment benefits until March 1 to give everyone more time to work out an agreeable plan for the whole year. House Speaker John Boehner agreed to the plan and the Senate adopted it, 90-10. But when Boehner went back to his caucus he faced rebellion from the tea party and freshmen.

Congressman Crawford termed the deal "irresponsible" and called on the House to defeat it. It did. Crawford, Griffin and Womack voted "no." Womack held a news conference Tuesday before Christmas to praise himself and his fellow freshmen for being tough.

But a tidal wave was in motion. Obama refused to budge further. Even the right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page condemned the House Republicans, saying they had sabotaged the party's chances in 2012 by putting the GOP foursquare for higher taxes on 99 percent of Americans and refusing to compromise. Senate Republicans were horrified.

The next day Crawford deleted the word "irresponsible" from his published statement of the day before and called on the speaker to take the deal. Boehner had already got the clear message that he should stand up to the teabaggers in his caucus. He held another conference call but this time did not allow Crawford, Womack, Griffin or anyone else to speak and he told them that he would hold another vote and this time he expected it to pass by unanimous consent. Not one objected.

Some deal it was, too. The Democrats had already caved on the millionaire tax cut — again — and accepted the Republican plan for paying for the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits. Instead of multimillionaires paying for it, middle-class people who buy or refinance their homes will pay for it over the next 10 years with a fee that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will charge loan originators.

Boy, that has to help the economy!

One more irony. Griffin claimed victory by saying that as part of the plan they had forced Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline — a great "job creator," he says — within three months.

He was exactly wrong. The president had made it clear that he would reject the pipeline if he were forced to decide before the kinks were worked out. Republican Nebraska was in revolt because the pipeline would carry the dirtiest oil in the world across the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies drinking water to the Great Plains. NASA's climate scientist said the pipeline would be the end game for global warming. The State Department said it could not complete its review within three months and would recommend disapproval.

But who cares about jobs as long as the president gets the blame?

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Proud to live in West Little Rock
12/28/2011

When my husband and I first moved to Little Rock, we knew little about the area, and had no preconceived notions about the metro's various neighborhoods. We came here with an open mind, eager to explore our new home, excited to see where our tastes would lead us. by Amy Bradley-Hole

We did, however, have a pretty fixed set of criteria that any potential neighborhood of ours must meet. We wanted to be near good schools, of course. Safety was a must — I don't want to be scared going from my carport to my door at night. An easy commute would be a benefit, and I also wanted to be near plenty of shopping and great restaurants. (My husband, a British expat, particularly wanted to be near an authentic curry house.) And even in the midst of a turbulent real estate market, we were hoping to find housing prices rooted in reality.

After just a little research, it became obvious that one Central Arkansas neighborhood clearly fit the bill — West Little Rock.

For us, West Little Rock is an amalgamation of all we treasure: convenience, comfort, affordability and a sense of being cradled in a community where the people we interact with daily aren't just acquaintances, but our neighbors and friends. Since we've relocated to Little Rock, we've moved twice more, and each time, we've made it a point to stay in this part of town we've come to love and call home. Right now we live in the Hillsborough subdivision, just off Hinson Road. It's a lovely neighborhood, featuring a mix of modern and traditional homes, and it's just minutes away from our school, our church and many of our friends.

Sure, there are drawbacks to life on the far side of town. It is, literally, hell on your wheels. There is no non-congested east-west corridor in this city, so if we West Little Rockers want to head downtown in the mornings or head back home from downtown in the evenings, it can be a daunting, stop-and-go proposition. Traffic on a Saturday around the Bowman, Chenal Parkway and Markham Street triangle isn't much fun, either. And despite some of the complaining letters to the editors about how the swanky side of town has well-kept streets, anyone who regularly drives in this area can testify to hitting potholes the size of a Hickory Creek mansion.

West Little Rock, for many, also symbolizes the worst of urban sprawl. Big-box stores. Cookie-cutter tract homes. Nouveau riche white people barreling obliviously through life in their jumbo SUVs with a Fellowship Bible Church sticker on the back. Yep, we've got all that, and for some people, it's enough of a deal breaker to keep them from ever crossing 430.

We've also got some hot pockets of criminal activity. I find myself intentionally avoiding the Mara Lynn/Green Mountain area at night. And a couple of the apartment complexes on Chenal Parkway (of all places!) have seen crimes against both persons and property in the past couple of years. But all statistical data shows that West Little Rock is, by far, the safest part of town.

But it seems the greatest criticism of those of us who've chosen to live in this community is our glaring lack of diversity. According to anecdotal opinion, we're all upper income Caucasians happily nestled in our 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath homes with our 2 to 3 children, representing the perfect nuclear families. Not so. West Little Rock is, geographically, quite a large community. It's much too large to be pigeonholed, whatever demographic measuring stick one chooses to hold up to it. Although the Chenal Valley neighborhoods, with their faux French names derived by Deltic Timber, are often decried as the embodiment of a typical West Little Rock neighborhood, they represent only a very limited part of this area. West Little Rock has a great deal of apartment and duplex living, bringing with it a younger and more transient population. It has subsidized housing, modest starter homes and neighborhoods that cater to low income and lower middle class income families.

The cultural diversity in West Little Rock is one of my favorite things about this area. In my son's classroom, there are kids of all colors and religions. I've had conversations about Buddhism with the Chinese family across the street. I picked up cooking tips from the Caribbean family in our old subdivision. The Korean women who run one of my favorite local spas also live just around the corner with their two families. And many of the UAMS faculty and staff members have chosen to settle out west, which has contributed even more to the diversity of the area. I have long argued that if you want the best ethnic food in town, you'll most likely find it somewhere on Shackleford, Markham or Rodney Parham.

Ah, the restaurants. We've got some good ones out here. Scott McGehee's Big Orange at the Promenade at Chenal is one of our newest additions. Ya Ya's Bistro, also at the Promenade, is a favorite neighborhood watering hole and gathering place. Chi's and Lilly's both offer excellent Dim Sum menus. Star of India most definitely satisfies my husband's, and many other people's, craving for a good curry. The Pantry and 1620 both keep foodies happy. I could list many more excellent independent restaurants, but let's not forget the chains, either. While many loathe their very existence, let's face it, they're convenient and affordable. And West Little Rock has a plethora of them, catering to any taste.

Our shopping is much the same as our restaurants. There are many successful independent boutiques in West Little Rock, selling everything from baby cribs to upscale clothing to outdoor gear. The aforementioned big box stores are, like the chain restaurants, convenient and popular options. And with the arrival of the Apple store and J. Crew, the Promenade at Chenal is fast becoming a mecca for serious shoppers of all tastes and incomes. That particular stretch of the Parkway, with the recent addition of the upscale Kroger Marketplace and the soon-to-be bustling new St. Vincent's medical facilities, has the potential for even more explosive growth.

And that may be what I truly love most about West Little Rock — the potential. It's much like a microcosm of America. It's a place where expansion and newness are good things. Where aspirations are OK, not inauthentic. Where people from all walks of life come together to live, play and work. It's a place I'm proud to call home.

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The Central promise
12/28/2011

Say "Central" and most people familiar with Little Rock will reflexively add "High" to it. The school is the city's most famous icon. Today, the neighborhood surrounding Central High is seeking to vie for its share of attention — and with some success. by Eric Francis

Less famous than the grand Quapaw Quarter it abuts, less fashionable than the later-vintage Hillcrest and Heights neighborhoods to the west, the Central High neighborhood nonetheless has the "good bones" that New Urbanism advocates crave: Vintage homes aching for restoration, streets largely devoid of commuter traffic, mature trees and big lots. And, like so many inner-city neighborhoods, it has also suffered over the decades from municipal neglect, an exodus of middle class and affluent residents, and deterioration of housing stock.

A drive through the area offers a clear vision of its grand past. On streets like Battery (whose former prestige is revealed by the mansions divided by a park on a two-block stretch between 19th and 21st), Schiller, Summit and Wolfe you can find block after block of impressive houses, ranging in size from cottages to impressive large homes. Many were clearly the domain of families with money and influence.

But the families who built those houses — almost all white, wealthy, and well-connected — abandoned the neighborhood many decades ago. In the years following, much of the fabric of the neighborhood began to unravel. Houses deteriorated, infrastructure was ignored, crime rose and owner-occupants were often replaced by renters. The population shifted to mostly poor and mostly black, and poor black neighborhoods typically didn't do well in Little Rock during the middle part of the last century.

Still, the area seems to be regaining some of its cachet; there may not exactly be a Renaissance going on, but the neighborhood's partisans say the area has more going for it than conventional wisdom will attest. Philander Smith College and Arkansas Baptist College are investing in the area, and while some houses sport the city's red tags denoting a condemned property, others display work permits for renovations. Middle class home-seekers interested in the ongoing trend of urban revival are coming back into Central Little Rock.

Sheila Miles is president of the Wright Avenue Neighborhood Association, for the area bounded by 17th Street on the north, Roosevelt on the south, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive on the east, and Thayer Street on the west. It and the adjoining Central High Neighborhood Association are the voices of the residents in the area, neither of which is shy about going to City Hall when they feel their neighborhoods aren't getting the attention or services they deserve.

"We're building relationships with neighborhoods, businesses, we have a good working relationship with the city," said Miles. "They've been really helpful in working with us on improving the image of the neighborhood. We established a crime prevention group and are trying to improve the public safety. I think those are some of the things that will set the foundation for a stronger community."

Wright says she's seen improvement since she moved to Battery Street in 2006.

"What drew me to the neighborhood initially was I loved the character of the historic homes," she said. "Once I moved here I met some really nice neighbors, and I see this area for one that is, I guess you could say, a diamond in the rough."

One of those neighbors who also saw through to the sparkle is Jennifer Carman, who has lived on Schiller Street since 2004. That's when she bought a 1912 Craftsman-style American Foursquare house that had been vacant for 18 years.

"The house was full of sleeping bats and needles and used condoms and debris," she recalls. "It was pretty shocking."

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But Carman is pretty handy with a hammer — and is an independent curator and art appraiser to boot, so she knows something about historic research — and she turned her house from a derelict to the belle of the ball. And she didn't stop there.

"I have played a role in four houses on this street, and a fifth I've designed the redevelopment for," said Carman. "I've convinced other investors to do so with my guidance. If you have the money, I have the know-how."

Now those rehabbed Craftsman houses stand out like beacons on Carman's block, but they're still in the minority; other dilapidated houses await similar treatment. But there's a bit of a Catch-22 given the current economy, she says.

"When money came so easily, it was kind of a difficult proposition to focus attention on this neighborhood. It was more risky than people wanted to be at that time," said Carman. "The great irony is now the momentum is like a runaway train. I see people on a daily basis driving through the neighborhood, looking at houses. But now nobody can get money."

That's especially frustrating, she said, because she and her collaborators have sold every house they've rehabbed and haven't lost money on any of them. Still, banks tell her they'd like to see another one sell before lending money to rehab additional houses.

"Even if the people are confident," she said, "the bank isn't."

Carman remains optimistic about the future of her neighborhood, especially given ongoing national trends toward more urban living. One of the best things that could happen, she said, is for the city to give Wright Avenue some serious attention, such as street and sidewalk improvements. That, she said, would be a big help in drawing in businesses to the neighborhood.

"To me, it's a main thoroughfare in a historic district, and it deserves five or eight blocks of exactly what you see on South Main or in Argenta: Period lights with underground wiring, maintained green spaces."

Carman ranks her neighborhood among Little Rock's "best-kept secrets."

"The physical location can't be beat. It's close enough to downtown but not close enough to hear the [fire station] sirens all night long. It's perfectly positioned to get you access to Hot Springs, Little Rock, North Little Rock, but you don't have to constantly look at the interstate," she said. "It's a diverse and vibrant community of friendly neighbors who will lend you flour and eggs to make a cake."

Land Bank and the Promise Neighborhood

The city has begun efforts to tackle blight and provide affordable housing south of Interstate 630, creating the Land Bank Commission to acquire "vacant, abandoned, tax-delinquent, and city lien properties." The focus area is bounded by Martin Luther King Jr. Drive on the east and Pine Street on the west, with 17th Street as a southern boundary. The land bank has already acquired almost 20 properties in the area.

Another major neighborhood initiative is the Central Little Rock Promise Neighborhood. Funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the Promise initiative is designed to provide a "cradle to career" pathway for children. The University of Arkansas at Little Rock is the lead agency for the local Promise grant and state Sen. Joyce Elliott is executive director of Central Little Rock Promise. Little Rock was one of only 21 cities in the country to receive an initial planning grant for the Promise program.

The Promise initiative is a collaboration between city government, schools, churches and businesses "to make sure that we are changing our neighborhood from the bottom up by engaging community people and looking at changing institutions and systems," said Elliott. "We are concentrating our energies primarily south of I-630."

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With $500,000 in hand for planning, Elliott said the Little Rock effort is being patterned after the successful Harlem Children's Zone in New York, with modifications to address the specific needs of Little Rock's core urban neighborhood.

"The promise we are making to the neighborhood, should all of this work, is we will do whatever it takes to make sure this neighborhood changes so kids have happy, healthy lives from birth through 24," she said. "If we can get one generation well-educated, good jobs, good citizens, it will change the whole neighborhood and their kids will not face the things these kids are facing now."

Central Little Rock Promise has eight partners — the city, UALR and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, the Central Arkansas Library System, the Little Rock School District, Arkansas Children's Hospital, Little Rock Preparatory Academy and New Futures for Youth. Representatives from those entities make up the Promise board; residents from each of the seven census tracts in the target area make up an advisory board, which includes dedicated positions for young people, the Hispanic community and clergy — about 21 seats in all, said Elliott.

The central focus is on successful schools, parent nurturing and support, and community building. And while the programs are targeted at the Central Little Rock area, Elliott noted that parents from outside the neighborhood whose kids attend one of the target schools — Franklin, Bale, and Stephens elementary schools, Little Rock Preparatory Academy, and Forest Heights Middle School — will be eligible to participate in all of the programs, as will parents whose children attend schools outside the target area.

Central Little Rock Promise did not win a $12 million implementation grant it applied for. But, Elliott said, the coalition will move forward with its plans.

"The central thing for people to know is we will continue this effort," she said. "What we're doing is changing the way we do business. That's the strategy and we have so many resources to do what we need to do in the neighborhood.

"It's such a great opportunity to be a game changer for our neighborhood," said Elliott. "If we learn how to get this right for this area, then we'll know what to do for expanding it further."

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Rebooting the HSDFI
12/28/2011

The often-beleaguered Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute, which has run into money troubles in recent years, has quietly installed a new executive director in recent months.

The often-beleaguered Hot Springs Documentary Film Institute, which has run into money troubles in recent years, has quietly installed a new executive director in recent months.

Carol Kimery, a 2010 graduate of UALR with a degree in marketing, was hired as executive director of the HSDFI in November. She had been the interim director since mid-October.

The Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival has been held annually in October for 20 years. There were fears the festival wouldn't materialize this fall, after the Hot Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau refused its annual $5,000 in support because the institute was in arrears on bills dating back to 2010.

The Malco Theater, home to the festival, is mortgaged to a local bank, and the institute has often been late on its payments. In April, citing more than $30,000 in debt, which then-director Dan Anderson blamed on overspending for filmmaker hospitality and staff costs, the institute furloughed all its employees.

Kimery hopes to turn that around. She worked in sales for 13 years, including a stint in New York, before going back to college at UALR to get her degree.

She said she got interested in film while serving as an intern to Little Rock Zoo spokesperson Susan Altrui.

Altrui has produced a number of short films in Little Rock. Kimery served as a production assistant on one of those films, and has since worked on the new Animal Planet reality show "American Stuffers" (see this week's Televisionist column for more), which was filmed in Romance.

Kimery said saving the Malco and recruiting more volunteers will be a big part of getting the festival out of trouble. Anderson, who was also the festival director, has taken a leave of absence, Kimery said, and is "working on another venture," and the majority of the members on the festival board, including the chairman, are new this year.

Kimery will take on Anderson's old job as well as her duties as head of the institute until the outcome of several grant applications is known.

Associate festival director Jim Miller will work on a volunteer basis. Kimery said that she hopes to eventually hire more employees after grants come in.

"We've restructured," Kimery said. "We're going through everything and making sure our i's are dotted and our t's are crossed. ... Some things fell by the wayside." She hopes to make people trust in the festival again — not only that it will survive, but that it is worth their volunteer hours and donations.

"People shouldn't believe what they've read," she said. "We've got a brand new board of directors, we've got a new chairperson and a new executive director. They've got to trust that it's not going to fall apart — that it's going to thrive and it's going to get better. They've got to trust us enough to grant us the grants and donate their time and money."

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Rez, 2012
12/28/2011

I was just finishing up my New Year's resolutions for 2012, and my thought was to keep them to myself this time, so as to avoid the usual hoorawing from y'all, starting in early February, for my inconstancy of purpose. by Bob Lancaster

Once I had them printed up and posted, though — thumbtacked to my forehead like Luther's theses — the resolutions assumed a life of their own and it became a matter like abortion to consider untimely ripping them off and throwing them in the fire and then taking the Fifth if anybody were to bring the subject up.

Which I still might do if the fifth we're talking here is Crown Royal.

I know this: They're harder to keep than make. And one of the harder ones to keep is to make up a frank, sincere batch of them in the first place. You're always tempted to monkey around with them, to play the fool.

But earnestness is the key to making the exercise worthwhile. Be dour. Dig deep.

But enough dithering. Here are the 2012 rez:

I'm not going to invite people to my soirees who ordinarily won't give me the time of day.

I'm making it a point to not learn any more than I already know, which is next to nothing, about this Kardashian bunch.

I'll try to remember often, and with ingratitude, that I got where I am today by standing on the shoulders of dwarves.

I'll not talk on the phone to androids.

I'll not tweet.

If these zombies become legion and manage to kick down my door, I'll try reasoning with them, then appeasing them with treats like on Halloween, and if that doesn't work I'll sic them on my neighbors, who, being more corpulent, should be more succulent — or so I will argue.

I'm not sending another penny to that guy in Nigeria, no matter how dire his straits.

It's hard, even bitter, for me to accept that others can do certain things better than I can. But I'm herewith resolving to accept it. Admission No. 1: I'll never paint fruit as good as Cezanne.

I'll not dispose of all my goods and property in anticipation of another Rapture date. Not again.

If I cross paths with one of the Koch brothers, I'm going to ask him the question posed first in Matthew 16:26 and then again in Mark 8:36. The one about gaining the world and losing your soul in the process. I imagine the response will be to signal one of their goons to administer a quietus.

I'll not stencil Bible verses into my eyeblack.

Even with my longstanding commitment to ethnic diversity, I won't welcome any of these crazy hairy ants into my neighborhood. Unless I need a mess of them to keep my aardvark fed.

I'll not poke at a pit bull through a wire fence with a sharp stick.

I'll not expect deference from cats.

I'll not wear jeans with one of the knees torn out if I go on Judge Judy.

I'll try my best to not let my disappointment show when People magazine chooses its annual Sexiest Man Alive.

I'm planning a summer telethon to raise money to help in the fight to eliminate the dog-peter gnat.

I'll not gesticulate when it's uncalled for.

I'll do Branson — if someone hogties me, throws me in the trunk of a car, and dumps me there.

Using the same rationale as Edmund Wilson's "The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles," I'll use my garden this year to grow a nice crop of weeds.

Unless I just have to, when I go somewhere, I'm not taking the phone.

I'll not vacation in Rumania. Or Pakistan. Or Cabot.

I'll not be joining Rep. Ross as a front-line defender in the War on Christmas.

If I come across any forgotten bags of unsown wild oats, I might feed them to the birds but I won't be sowing any of the bastards myself.

I've stood in enough lines. I won't be going gentle to take my place at the end of another one.

If I can think of a good reason not to, I won't.

Maybe I'll try one more time, but I just can't read Melville.

I'll hear you out on "enhanced interrogation techniques" after you've read "Waiting for the Barbarians" by J. M. Coetzee.

I'm not going to play games with these weasels and dumbasses and blowhards. I might be able to conversate with some of them if they were ever right about anything, but they're not. They wallow in wrongness like my old ducoc Van Dalsem used to do in his mudhole.

If she's still alive, I'm going to look up my Seventh Grade civics teacher and tell her at least one of her students got far enough along to learn that the river Thames has a different pronunciation from the one she tried to pin on it: it doesn't rhyme with the sixth word in the preceding paragraph. Not even close.

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Hillcrest: The best neighborhood in Little Rock
12/28/2011

I live in a two-story brick house on Ridgeway Street that my neighbors would surely like to see spiffed up, but Ridgeway is in Hillcrest, and because Hillcrest attracts an eclectic, tolerant type of person, the neighbors have never complained. At least not directly to me. by Leslie Newell Peacock

The mortar between the bricks is made from river sand, so that the brickwork sags in places; the previous owner repaired the cracks without benefit of trowel (or expertise), but who cares? The house stands, if barely. Our friend who makes small repairs to our house has filled the box gutters with some kind of expanding plastic foam to keep the rain out (otherwise it runs down the brick wall of the glassed-in porch), so that yellow bubbles poke out as if our gutters are sprouting fungi. But who cares? It's Hillcrest, and you've got to have a sense of humor when you live in what peripatetic columnist John Brummett famously called "drafty charmers," with their rhomboid windows hinting at shifting nearly century-old foundations. We live with it. And we are happy to be there, because Ridgeway Street — and Midland, Crystal Court, Linwood, Colonial Court, Pine, Oak, Cedar, Hill Road, Oakwood and all those presidential and lettered streets, etc. — are in the best neighborhood in Little Rock. (The street is curvy by design, "following the foothills and hillcrests" as a 1911 promotional brochure cited by Cheryl Nichols and Sandra Taylor Smith in their cherished (by the neighborhood) opus "Hillcrest: The History and Architectural Heritage of Little Rock's Streetcar Suburb" said. Like Midland Hills' curving streets, ascending from Markham and the old city of Little Rock, and the neighborhood's eclectic architecture, Hillcrest's residents also eschew the grid and cookie-cutter way of thinking, which is a nice way of saying they're a little bent. (Mostly toward the left, but we tolerate those who've lost their way.)

On Ridgeway — which has a constant supply of children filling in as older ones go off to college, meaning there will often be kids playing basketball in the street, the hoop set up on the sidewalk, or riding bikes or chasing balls, so you had better drive slow or we'll kill you — there's a lot of what you would call bonhomie, which is to say that we like to visit one another clutching fresh gin and tonics in our hands or plastic cups filled with wine (the better to disguise the libation if one is en route to the Hillcrest Girls Softball League play in Allsopp Park, as every parent of a girl is at one point or another). I am certain this is true of other streets in Hillcrest as well, and I can vouch for Kavanaugh when First Thursdays and Harvest Fests and all the other street parties held in the no-big-boxes-here commercial district roll around.

A little more history from the Nichols-Smith book: The upper part of Hillcrest, where the big houses line the streets leading to Knoop Park, a brilliant creation of the Works Progress Administration to give the neighborhood a place to stroll and view the Little Rock skyline, was once its very own town, Pulaski Heights, incorporated in 1905. The area to the south was the city's first suburb, springing up around the streetcar line on Kavanaugh (then Prospect Avenue). In 1906, Pulaski Heights added the Hillcrest Addition, the crest north across the ravine that would become Allsopp Park. A steel suspension bridge gave the folks north of the ravine access to the streetcar line, and in true Hillcrest spirit, the concrete piers that remain in Allsopp Park have been painted with a scene of people seated in a movie theater, an act carried out by clever teen-agers in the early dawn. In a move that anticipated today's westward expansion, the little town glommed on to Little Rock in 1916 to get fire protection.

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Hillcrest has resisted the tear-down trend our brothers and sisters in the Heights have embraced, so the homes that sprang up in those days are the homes you see today, with a few sad exceptions. Name the architectural style, you'll see it here.

Little Rock's city fathers wisely heeded landscape architect John Nolen's advice to preserve the woods that would become Allsopp Park, as being too hilly to develop. And what a park it is, deep woods crisscrossed with walking and bike paths. There are crawdads to fish for in the creek, a resident pair of hawks in early spring and places to play in the flatlands.

I didn't grow up in Hillcrest, so I'm not as familiar with its sewer tunnels the way all Heights children were with theirs in the 1950s. But I did know about Spatz Bakery, which had the best chocolate eclairs ever, in one of the quaint storefronts along Kavanaugh, a little business district that helps make Hillcrest the complete, perfect neighborhood it is.

Pulaski Heights Junior High School, built between 1920 and 1936 as an elementary school, was scarcely changed when I went to school there in the 1960s, though the boys could go through the girls' door and the girls through the boys' door. There was a wonderful little grocery across the street on Lee where you could get a Grapette; the orthodontist office was there, too, so there was no way to get out of getting your braces tightened periodically. Back then, when schools didn't close until there was actually snow on the ground, the Island X was waiting to serve cheese dip to kids walking home in the snow. The Mexican restaurant later became known as the Felony Lounge, but I'm not sure why. It burned down in the 1990s.

About 30 years after I was a student at PHJH, I was walking my own kid to Pulaski Heights Elementary, next to the junior high. Here's how you get your kid to school in Hillcrest: You pour a big cup of coffee and head out the door with child in tow and walk there, with all the other parents holding cups of coffee, all accompanied by the family dogs. The gossip continues after the bell rings, on the return home.

Here's how far I have to go to get to a grocery store: About five blocks. To the waterworks park: About five blocks. To Allsopp Park: About five blocks. To the new bike store: Two blocks. To the cute independent dress shop: Four blocks. To the bus stop: Two blocks. To the Greek diner, seven blocks. To get a great Margarita, five blocks. To the upscale country chic furniture store, seven blocks. To the pool hall (were I to suddenly decide to take up smoking), five blocks. To the hairdresser — well, if there's anything overblown about Hillcrest, it is that there is a salon, or two, on every block. On a recent night, the neighborhood bar (near the pool hall/bar) was full of locals listening to one of their own, a heart surgeon when she's not singing, croon with a klezmer band.

Is there any other park in town where you'll hear the strains of the bagpipes being played by the musician who lives in the "Hillcrest Addition"?

Plenty of neighborhoods have chickens these days, but we think the gals we have in the two henhouses on our street are the best in town.

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A guide to New Year's Eve
12/28/2011

It's that time of year again, when we adorn ourselves in our most festive, shimmering finery and our most humorously oversized glitter-encrusted novelty glasses and top hats. by Robert Bell

It's that time of year again, when we adorn ourselves in our most festive, shimmering finery and our most humorously oversized glitter-encrusted novelty glasses and top hats so that we can get gouged on cover charges by industrious promoters who know it's likely their only shot all year at wringing a bit of filthy lucre from all of you 9-to-5 stiffs who only go out once every 365 days. But hey, there's probably a plastic flute full of tepid bubbly in it for you, and if you're lucky, a New Year's kiss from your sweetheart or failing that, a probably harmless stranger. Besides, who cares if the cover charges are a little higher? It's New Year's Eve fer Pete's sake, don't be such a cheapskate. Go out and have some fun and drink some drinks and get all covered in confetti, but just make sure to call a cab or have a designated driver to get you home again.

Here's a rundown of New Year's Eve parties:

If you're looking for a New Year's celebration filled with unbridled rock 'n' roll, Stickyz has your ticket, with Fayetteville's Benjamin del Shreve, Careworn and Belair. It's an 18-and-older show, 9 p.m., $15.

Conway Boyz Productions presents "The Arkansas New Year's Eve Party," including DirtyRob, DJs Aone, Flying Brian, Chucci Da Basegod Tarintino and more, going down at Michelangelo's Italian Ristorante in Conway, 10 p.m., $15.

Over at the White Water Tavern, you can greet 2012 with a big dose of Big Silver, 10 p.m., a very reasonable $5.

Porter's Jazz Cafe hosts a party with the On Call Band, 9 p.m., $35 per person or $65 per couple adv., $40 and $75, respectively, at the door, includes champagne toast, balloon drop and party favors. Or you can reserve a table, $100 for two, $190 for four or $280 for six, includes a bottle of champagne, chocolate covered strawberries, appetizer sampler and party favors.

Revolution hosts Fireball 6: The '80s Party, with the final performance from Memphis party band The Venus Mission, 9 p.m., $15.

Flying DD — which bills itself as The Sports Bar with Balls — has a night of raging hard rawk featuring Four on the Floor, 9 p.m., $10, includes champagne toast.

In Hot Springs, Maxine's hosts a diverse musical lineup, with Blue Screen Skyline, From Which We Came, Brother Andy & His Big Damn Mouth and Stiff Necked Fools, 8 p.m., $10 adv., $12 door.

If you want to catch Nashville-based Cody Belew & The Mercers while they're still in town, get out to Cajun's Wharf. The cover charge includes party favors, an appetizer buffet from 7 p.m. to midnight and a midnight champagne toast, doors open at 7 p.m., $25.

The Afterthought will probably pack the place out with local rock 'n' roll favorites The Goodtime Ramblers, 9 p.m., $20.

At Juanita's, the classic rock- and blues-loving outfit Katmandu plays downstairs, while the upstairs hosts B-Level, doors at 9 p.m., $25 adv., $30 d.o.s.

The Tavern Sports Grill has that most elusive phenomenon: the New Year's Eve party with no cover charge. Includes music from After Eden and drink specials all night, 9 p.m.

Flying Saucer sends 2011 into deep space with Mayday by Midnight, 9 p.m., $25.

Sway hosts "Minutes to Midnight," which boasts a VIP package including complimentary hors d'oeuvres, express red carpet entry and ever-flowing champagne fountains. General admission includes a midnight toast, balloon and confetti drop, laser light show, live video recording, complimentary mix tape and party favors and more, 9 p.m. $15 general entry, $35 for VIP package.

At Cregeen's, greet 2012 with The Fragile Elite, 8 p.m., $10 with champagne toast.

Mojo Music Management presents a jam-tastic New Year's Eve Bash with performances from FreeVerse, Interstate Buffalo and Justin Bank & The Knights of Pulaski at Vino's, 8 p.m., $15-$25.

The Peabody has a giant New Year's Eve concert, with music from Tragikly White, Tyrannosaurus Chicken, Rodney Block & The Real Music Lovers, Epiphany and Tomorrow Maybe, Tre' Day, plus DJs g-force and Brandon Peck, 9 p.m., $45 adv., $55 d.o.s. There's also a special Duck Master VIP package available, which includes a four-hour open bar and breakfast snacks for $150 and overnight room packages starting at $230 per couple.

Shooter's Sports Bar & Grill has Mr. Happy, 7 p.m., $10 including a champagne toast.

Reel in 2012 at Denton's Trotline with local country stalwart Ryan Couron, 9 p.m., $25 including a champagne toast.

Discovery Nightclub hosts "Under the Bigtop," featuring DJs Ewell, Jared, Crawley, JMZ Dean, and Mistery, with performers Dominique and others, 9 p.m., $15, includes champagne or well drink of your choice. The club is also giving away a pair of Cotton Bowl tickets.

If you happen to be up in Boone County, you can party like it's 1929 at the Harrison New Year's Eve celebration. The event includes music from The Cate Brothers, food from several area restaurants, dancing, and, for the first time, alcoholic beverages. It's going down at the 1929 Hotel Seville, 9 p.m., $20 single, $30 couple, with hotel packages starting at $235.

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Unique neighborhoods of Central Arkansas
12/28/2011

Looking at where we live every day and noticing fundamental change is a little like looking into the mirror every morning. It looks the same as yesterday, but over the last two decades, it's become a different face and a different city. by Alan Leveritt

Over burgers at Stickyz last August, my friend Tom Peterson remarked that Little Rock had changed in the 20 years he had lived here and in some ways now resembled his hometown of Chicago.

"Little Rock and North Little Rock have neighborhoods now," he told me. "With the exception of Heights and Hillcrest, Little Rock was nothing but a collection of subdivisions and big malls when I moved here. Now you have real neighborhoods with their own feel and with restaurants and shops that are dedicated to that area."

So we've set out to document that change in this week's issue. Reading through these essays, I think you will be struck by the incredible diversity we have for an urban area of no more than 250,000 people. For example, we have new "creative class" neighborhoods like Argenta and South Main, affluent suburban neighborhoods such as Northwest Little Rock and Chenal, historic middle class black neighborhoods such as the Central High neighborhood and the newly Latinized neighborhoods of Southwest City and Levy. Where people once looked for the perfect house, now they are finding the perfect neighborhood. And here there is a neighborhood for every lifestyle.

As this issue goes to press, we are also creating a Unique Neighborhoods of Central Arkansas website. It'll reside permanently in the GUIDES section of the Arkansas Times website, arktimes.com. If you know of someone considering a move or visit to Central Arkansas, tell them they can get a better feel for us there in just a few weeks. Additionally, we are turning this issue into a hardbound book that will include more color photography as well as all of the essays. It will be available from the Arkansas Times, local bookstores and our sponsors.

I hope you enjoy this issue. Many of essays are highly personal and highly subjective, written by people who feel a special connection to where they live. When you read the essay on your neighborhood, if you think to yourself, "Yes, that's who lives here, that's what it feel like," then we will have been successful with this issue.

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Learning to love North Little Rock in Park Hill
12/28/2011

Any description of North Little Rock's Park Hill neighborhood will eventually, inevitably, include a comparison to Hillcrest, its better-known cousin south of the river. by Jennifer Barnett Reed

Any description of North Little Rock's Park Hill neighborhood will eventually, inevitably, include a comparison to Hillcrest, its better-known cousin south of the river.

On the surface, the comparison is apt. Park Hill, which straddles JFK Boulevard from Interstate 40 north to roughly McCain Boulevard, was developed at about the same time as Hillcrest. It's home to a number of 1920s-era houses in the historic district, lots of sidewalks and mature trees, a central thoroughfare lined with locally owned shops.

The prospect of owning a Hillcrest-style house in a Hillcrest-esque neighborhood for roughly half the Hillcrest price is what pushed me past my childhood bias against the north side of the river. My mother was raised in Park Hill and my grandmother lived in Lakewood, the next neighborhood over, when I was a kid, but still, when I was growing up in the '80s in what is now Midtown Little Rock, North Little Rock might as well have been Mars. No one cool came from North Little Rock, right? Our mall was so much better than theirs. I mean North Little Rock was practically Jacksonville, for the love of God. Yes, I used to tag along with my high school boyfriend to Peaches and the Arkansas Record Exchange (no CDs back then), but those two oases of hip were the exceptions that proved the rule.

A year after my husband and I moved back to Little Rock, though — in 2004, at the height of the real estate boom — we had to face the harsh reality that as much as we loved living in Hillcrest, we couldn't afford to buy a house there, and neither could we bear to live in our crappy apartment with our Jerry Springer Show neighbors one more second than we absolutely had to. A cookie-cutter starter house in West Little Rock was out of the question, so my husband told me to stop being a closed-minded idiot and we started looking in Park Hill.

What we found, besides a perfectly charming 1924 bungalow with a huge front porch and a wonderfully roomy, flat backyard listed for $85 a square foot, is a neighborhood that, kind of like North Little Rock as a whole, just does its own thing.

There is a variety of architecture in Park Hill that doesn't seem to exist in many other neighborhoods, for one. Craftsman bungalows and stone English Revivals from the 1920s sit next to post-WWII frame tract houses from the 1940s, ranches from the 1950s and '60s, and, mixed in among the rest, some truly one-of-a-kind works of art that I never tire of walking past no matter how many years I've lived here. My two favorites: a house on Skyline that appears to be made of three cylinders kind of squashed together, and one on Goshen that someone who knows more about architecture than I do might describe as mid-century modern, all stark white and vertical lines with a playful turquoise front door. And in the next neighborhood over, Lakewood — a lovely if more homogenous area that is technically within walking distance if you can hack the hike up Snake Hill — there is a structure that I call the Parabola House. Picture picking up a square piece of paper by two opposite corners so those corners point up, then bending the other two opposite corners so they point down — that's what the Parabola House looks like, plus a crow's nest and a couple other random oddities. I would set up a tent in the street and stare at it all day long if I weren't afraid of being arrested.

(In fact, Park Hill's proximity to Lakewood is a major selling point, especially if you want to pay the annual fee to join the Lakewood Property Owners Association, which gets you access to a great park, a swimming pool, fishing and boating in the neighborhood's six lakes, discounted rentals of a pavilion and a clubhouse, etc. Enjoying the lake views while you walk/jog/bike is free.)

All the different styles and sizes (and price points) of houses in Park Hill have attracted just as diverse a group of residents — socioeconomically, racially to some degree, and, judging from the yard signs during election years, politically as well. My nearest neighbors are a young single woman in a small frame house, an older lady in a ranch, a couple in their 50s with a passel of grandchildren the same age as my kids in a beautifully detailed stone English Revival designed by architect James Carmean; another couple in their 50s in a gorgeous flat-roofed glass-walled modern house that kind of disappears into the ravine, and a woman and her two grown children in a bungalow just like ours.

Park Hill is a front-yard kind of neighborhood — people don't hide behind giant garages and privacy fences. And we don't have the kind of petty crime that comes with the territory in a lot of older neighborhoods.

Thanks to a group of skittish voters 40-some-odd years ago, we don't have the vibrant entertainment district, either. There is plenty of retail along JFK, and it's just as diverse as the neighborhood's residents: upscale home decor boutiques, bridal shops, a furniture rental place, a Schlotzky's, an art gallery, a Razorbacks memorabilia store, three gas stations and a tire shop, among others. But residents of the voter precincts that straddle JFK Boulevard from Skyline to Kierre voted themselves dry back in the 1960s rather than face the prospect of a single liquor store opening near JFK and McCain, and because of that — and possibly also because JFK is just not as friendly to pedestrian and slow-moving vehicular traffic as Kavanaugh Boulevard is — Park Hill suffers from a pronounced lack of the kind of restaurants and night spots that make Hillcrest, the Heights and these days Argenta so distinctive. It's not like you have to drive 40 miles to have a glass of wine with your dinner, though, and Argenta is just a couple of miles down the road, so I don't consider it a fatal flaw.

That's another nice thing about Park Hill — it's close to everything, and there's almost always a back way to get there that'll keep you out of the traffic snarls on McCain. North Little Rock has pretty much all the conveniences of Little Rock, just more compact: My house is half a block from one park and two blocks from another, four blocks from good fudge, six blocks from the onramp to I-40/I-30, one mile from Hobby Lobby and Shipley's, two and a half miles from Barnes and Noble and Argenta Market, and four miles from both downtown Little Rock and Lowe's. The only place that feels far away is West Little Rock, and now that we have an Indian restaurant north of the river, I can't find much reason to mind.

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In the center of things in Midtown
12/28/2011

I live in Midtown, also known as the Hall High neighborhood, where proximity is everything. I enjoy boasting that I can get anywhere I need to be in 15 minutes or less. by Katherine Wyrick

I live in Midtown, also known as the Hall High neighborhood, where proximity is everything. I enjoy boasting that I can get anywhere I need to be in 15 minutes or less. I'm five minutes from sushi in the Heights and a mere 10 from catfish at the Lassis Inn off Interstate 30. Should I choose to catch a play at the Rep downtown or a movie at the Rave, I can do either with minimal driving time and effort. If I'm feeling sporty, Pinnacle is an accessible 15 minutes away, and the River Trail even closer. The kids' school is 18 minutes on foot from our house — not that we walk, but we could — and I live too close to our gym to ever use distance as an excuse for not exercising. When my daughter was little, I could walk her down the block to preschool and spy on her during the day on the enclosed playground. Were I so inclined, I could attend a panoply of churches that are a stone's throw from my house — Methodist, Episcopalian, Lutheran and nondenominational. I'm also just minutes away from a yoga studio on H Street and my favorite library, Fletcher.

And as if things weren't convenient enough, they had to go build a Target on University earlier in the year! So much for my moratorium on buying plastic storage bins, T-shirts and other superfluous sundries. Before Target, the opening of Midtowne shopping center — in what was once dead space across from Park Plaza Mall — marked a new beginning for the business district in this area. Little Rock gained big-city cred with the introduction of retailers like The Container Store, Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma. And many midtown families make a habit of hitting Pei Wei for a fast, inexpensive dinner or Cantina Laredo for a pricier, upscale one. Thankfully, if I don't feel like shelling out big bucks for guacamole, I can skip on down University in no time to one of our favorite Mexican haunts.

To help you get your bearings: Though northern and southern boundaries of the neighborhood are less distinct, heavily-traveled Mississippi and University avenues generally are considered as western and eastern boundaries. H Street and Evergreen Drive are among the busier streets carrying traffic between the two avenues. Very loosely speaking, this area is bracketed by Mississippi, Cantrell and I-430.

A bit of history: Originally developed in the late 1940s, Midtown was the suburb for many members of the Greatest Generation who chose to build low-standing, ranch-style homes in the hills west of Hillcrest. We asked a lifelong Little Rock resident who attended Hall High in the '50s about her impression of the neighboring houses at the time, and she replied, "Low." An accurate description, especially when compared with the multi-storied homes in the city's older neighborhoods. Though the Heights and Hillcrest, which border the Hall High area, are technically suburbs themselves, neighborhoods in Little Rock generally become more suburb-like the farther west you travel. Case in point, I have a garage almost half the size of my house — with an automatic door. I also have a pink-tiled bathroom circa 1950. Jealous?

True, there are many nondescript houses in these parts, but there are also several 1960s-'70s gems thrown in the mix. A Fay Jones-esque stone house just blocks from Hall High comes to mind as one particularly shining example of the retro cool architecture you can find here. Another plus is the abundance of trees and rolling hills, though many trees didn't survive a devastating tornado that tore through the neighborhood in the spring of 2011. Evergreen was especially hard hit, losing many of the trees for which it was originally named.

Though it lacks the community feel of, say, Hillcrest, there is much to recommend in Midtown, especially for families who've outgrown their houses and need something both bigger and more affordable. Many young families move from Hillcrest for this very reason. A father of three who relocated from Capitol View says he likes the extra space and also having a creek near his house where his kids can play.

I also like the diversity of this neighborhood. Here are some of the people I know who live here: a therapist, a health care worker, a school teacher, a novelist, a photographer, a bike mechanic, a nurse, a dance teacher, a church administrator and a landscaper. In parts it's solidly middle-class while other streets like Pinnacle Point and Pine Valley veer towards the upper-middle class range.

Another plus is Meriwether Park, which, thanks to the efforts of neighborhood activist Clayton Johnson, has undergone a remarkable transformation. The park that Johnson once described as the "crescent of fear" is now a draw for residents. In the springtime you'll usually find a baseball game in progress and people knocking a tennis ball around on the court. At any time of year, you'll see dog walkers strolling the circular path and kids on the playground, some climbing up the metal rocket at its center (hence the park's alternate moniker, "Rocket Park"). The park sits a block away from one of the city's most desirable magnet schools, Williams Elementary. (Note: Though there's a "shadow zone," living near the school by no means guarantees admittance.) Catholic High is just up the road near Park Plaza, and clean-cut, oxford-wearing young men can often be spotted tearing through surrounding cut-through streets after school.

Streets are, however, for the most part quiet, many with limited roadways in and out. Not only does it make the roads safer, but also more conducive to family play outdoors.

And there is a positive flipside to Midtown's lack of community — anonymity. You can retreat into your garage and close the door behind you. Or, as one single mother who had moved from the Heights put it, "I love having more privacy and not running into people I know at every turn." I prefer to sum it up this way: I feel compelled to put on lipstick before going into the Heights Kroger, but don't even consider it if heading to the Edwards Food Giant in Midtown. Now that's convenience.

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Little Rock's shadow government
12/28/2011

I exchanged several notes with Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola last week about his disappointment over Pulaski Tech's rejection of a proposal to move its culinary school downtown. by Max Brantley

I exchanged several notes with Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola last week about his disappointment over Pulaski Tech's rejection of a proposal to move its culinary school downtown. He still thinks he had better cost estimates that proved the plan could work on available money. He insists he holds no ill will against Pulaski Tech as it moves toward a property tax election, but adds that he wants to know details first. Which is fair.

Inevitably, though, our conversation turned to the divide in Little Rock — the one between rich and poor and black and white. It's best illustrated by the city's shadow government, the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Stodola says he can't understand my obsession with the topic. I can't understand why he can't understand.

When Stodola jetted off to Paris, it was Jay Chessir, CEO of the Chamber, who shared the publicly financed haute cuisine at Stodola's table.

When Little Rock passed a sales tax, it was a committee set up, financed and administered by Chessir and his employees that ran the show. They did so without disclosing their involvement on campaign papers and without the campaign committee reporting in-kind contributions from the chamber for its administrative support and Chessir's time.

The chamber wrote the law that set up the new technology park authority. Through that law, the chamber effectively controls the governing board, including a designated seat for Chessir. The sales tax the chamber puppet committee promoted provided $22 million to the technology authority. The tax passed, but was trounced in the neighborhood in which the Chessir-created, chamber-controlled and city-financed board intends to expropriate dozens of homes of lower-income minority citizens.

Chessir successfully fought disclosure of how the sales tax campaign money was spent. I'd like to know, for example, if they hired any neighborhood "consultants" to help with the campaign. Chessir has also successfully fought disclosing how the chamber spends the $200,000 in taxpayer money that Stodola insists on providing the agency for putative economic development work. It's a sham deal. It is a taxpayer subsidy to work the chamber was already doing. The city itself once did it with public employees whose work WAS transparent.

The chamber was in the thick of the effort to move the culinary school downtown from the southwest location. Working class stiffs in Southwest Little Rock, including a city director whose opinions had not been sought, weren't happy about the implied disrespect.

The chamber continues to support at-large election of city board members, a process that favors wealthy neighborhoods and depresses influence of the city's black/Latino majority. It likes the system so much, a chamber employee has worked to impose at-large elections on the Little Rock School Board, too. This fits with the chamber's unsuccessful effort six years ago to take over the School Board. Defeated at the polls, it has turned its attention to supporting the charter school movement (a movement littered with failure) and using its mailing list to trash the Little Rock School District. How this encourages economic development is beyond me.

The chamber was established to maximize members' profits, which means minimizing pay, benefits and access to the courts for members' employees and customers and the public at large. This is legal, of course, even laudable to some. I'd be less obsessed about it if my tax money wasn't paying for it. See now, mayor?

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The rich history of Riverdale
12/28/2011

Northwest of downtown and adjacent to the Arkansas River lies Little Rock's Riverdale neighborhood, an area that has been an important part of my life and my family's history. by Randy Wilbourn

Northwest of downtown and adjacent to the Arkansas River lies Little Rock's Riverdale neighborhood, an area that has been an important part of my life and my family's history.

This morning, as I played with my granddaughter at our home in Sherrill Heights, a Riverdale neighborhood, I counted back and was able to recall six generations of Wilbourns that have lived and worked in Little Rock's Riverdale area over the last 112 years. It was around the year 1910 when my great-grandfather, William Wilbourn, began managing farms that comprised most of what is now Riverdale. That farmland began near the intersection of today's Riverfront Drive and Cantrell Road, continued through the areas that are now Rebsamen Park Golf Course and Murray Park and ended beyond the Big Dam Bridge by the mouth of the Little Maumelle River, where I-430 now crosses the Arkansas River. Before 1927, short levees existed that gave some protection to the farmland along the southern bank of the river.

At one point in the early '70s, my grandfather, father and I all worked together in The Mart Building (now known as the T.J. Rainey Building) for Allied Telephone Company. Allied had its first offices on Kavanaugh Boulevard in Hillcrest. Allied became Alltel and eventually merged with Verizon, so the company has a long history in the Riverdale area. My grandfather, father and I all lived in the Riverdale and Hillcrest neighborhoods, commuting down the hill to work just as William Wilbourn had done in the early 1900s.

Today my office in the Morgan Keegan building on Riverfront Drive in Riverdale sits on the same land William Wilbourn managed, in sight of the Big Rock bluffs and the calm-one-week, raging-the-next Arkansas River. To me, Riverdale is more than a place to go to work on the Verizon campus, stop and eat at Buffalo Grill, or buy a flower for the table from About Vase and a bottle of wine from Bullard's. I am deeply rooted here. It is home.

Riverdale has changed since my great-grandfather's time. On his daily commute, William rode his horse through a neighborhood of laborers that worked on nearby farms, at the quarries and mills that grew up along the river bottomland, for the Rock Island Rail line, or in the fast-growing Hillcrest and Prospect Terrace developments along the Kavanaugh street car line that connected the new "west" Little Rock to downtown. Today that area is the Allsopp Park softball diamond, tennis courts and children's playground.

Wrape Lumber Co. had a large sawmill where the Episcopal Collegiate School now resides. There was a large quarry where Rivercliff apartments now stands, and another at the foot of what is now Scenic Drive, served by a rail spur that connected to the rail line in the valley below. The area was home to cotton gins, a boarding house, commissary offices, grain and cotton warehouses, horse and mule barns, another sawmill, lumberyards, rail sidings and a small rail depot.

Riverdale was decimated in 1927 when the receding waters of the great flood ripped the farmland apart. The flood destroyed the levees that had held the river in check, leaving only a narrow strip of sandy land along the base of the south river bluffs. After the disaster, the rail line was rebuilt but the farms never recovered. They lay fallow for years, and were eventfully converted to golf courses for the city of Little Rock and Riverdale Country Club. William Wilbourn did not see the long-term effects of the devastation. He died shortly after the floodwaters receded.

Riverdale recovered from the flood and continued to move forward and develop. After the completion of the McClellan-Kerr Navigation project, Murray Park was founded in the north part of the neighborhood.

A major change occurred in the early 1960s when developer Wythe Walker, working with the city and Winthrop Rockefeller, used urban renewal funds to transform the area. Cantrell Road was rerouted to its present course and expanded to four lanes, and Cantrell Hill was widened. Westriver Tower and the Mart building, Riviera Apartments and the all-night diner the Toddle House were added to the area. Riverdale Country Club became Pleasant Valley Country Club and moved west, and the Riverdale Business Park opened. The office park, housing and apartment centers we see in the area today followed.

Modern Riverdale is bordered on the east by the MacDonald-Wait-Newton House (commonly known as the Packet House), an architectural landmark in Little Rock. Constructed in 1869, it is the last remaining of the large houses that were built on the north side of Cantrell Road in the 19th century. Plans are underway to open a Southern-fusion restaurant, the Packet House Grill, in the historic building.

West of the Packet House is the corporate headquarters of Dillard's Department Stores, followed by a section of warehouses and businesses including Discovery nightclub and landmark restaurant and bar Cajun's Wharf.

Farther west, the neighborhood progresses toward shopping areas, office complexes, upscale residential communities, and a popular mix of restaurants skewing toward Southern and Italian cuisine. In recent years Riverdale has experienced an increase in design-oriented businesses, with retailers offering antiques, ceramics, fine fabrics, plants and specialty lighting fixtures. Beyond these venues are soccer fields, corporate towers and apartments, then Rebsamen Park Golf Course, the city's largest public golf course, and Murray Park to the far west along Riverfront Drive.

The Arkansas River carved out the valley in which most of Riverdale rests, it defines the physical shape of the neighborhood and its steady presence recalls the area's long history; but the charm, character and work ethic that defines Riverdale rises from the businesses that call it home, the good people that live here and everyone else that comes to the neighborhood to work, eat and play each day.

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Durable as the stuff in a hardware store
12/28/2011

Seen from the Interstate, on the way from somewhere to somewhere, Levy looks picturesque, even pretty, nestled in the bowl of a valley west of North Little Rock's Park Hill, a patchwork of rooftops sticking up above the trees. by David Koon

Once you get off the freeway, you can see that Levy is really a town within a town. It's a working-class place, as it has been since the start — plain, honest, maybe even a little gritty. Many of the businesses that anchored the community for years, like Venable Lumber Co., are boarded up or gone. For a lot of people, it's a middle place now, somewhere they drive through to get elsewhere, someplace they leave at quitting time, someplace they live but want to leave when they can afford better. The best symbol of Levy these days might be the monolithic overpass which leaves a swath of the old downtown buried in shadow a good bit of the day.

That said, while older businesses have moved on, others — many of them catering to the area's growing Latino population — have sprung up: Mexican grocery stores, restaurants, and a Latino-patronized billiard parlor downtown. There are still old-line businesses there, still people there, folks who say they're in for the duration. And if a neighborhood isn't about the determination to stay, to make something new from the old, then what is it?

The town of Levy was started by Ernest Stanley, a young businessman who opened a hardware and grocery store there in 1897, near a field where farmers often camped while bearing their crops to market in Little Rock and points east. Morris Levy, a German-Jewish shopkeeper from Little Rock who later opened a successful dry-goods store in nearby Argenta, had provided Stanley with enough money to start his new store, so Stanley named the town that grew up around it after him. North Little Rock was apparently hot to annex Levy nearly from the beginning, so Levy incorporated in 1917 to try and cling to municipal independence. They couldn't stop progress or the expanding borders of their neighboring city, however, and Levy was officially annexed into North Little Rock in 1947.

The hardware store started by Ernest Stanley is still in Levy, if you can believe it, making it one of the oldest continuously-operated businesses in Central Arkansas. It's not in the same place as the first incarnation (that spot is occupied by a gas station under the interstate overpass now), but it's still the same name out front in the latest location at 4308 MacArthur Drive.

People drive in from miles around to shop at Stanley; to get their mowers worked on, their chainsaws sharpened, to buy bags of framing nails, canning jars, jar lifters, sandpaper on rolls, draw knives, oil cans straight out of "The Wizard of Oz," cast iron skillets, pocket knives, and woodworker's spoke shaves in two sizes: small and large. A big black and white cat — which the clerks have named, perhaps inevitably, Stanleycat — came in from the cold a few years back. They didn't have the heart to put her out, so she stayed, sleeping amongst the cans of paint and prowling the aisles. The clerks know most of the customers by name, just like clerks before them knew many of the current customers' fathers by name. It's that kind of place. There aren't many like it anymore, in this world of Faster/Cheaper trumping all.

Jeff Dumboski bought Stanley from the third-generation owner in 2005. Dumboski grew up in Levy, and remembers coming to Stanley with his dad. Levy back then was a whole different world.

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"It was nice," he said. "Everybody got along with everybody. You could ride your bike everywhere you wanted to go, you didn't get hassled, you didn't get messed with. You knew all the neighbors on your street, and even the neighbors a few streets over from you." His mother still lives in the same house he grew up in, he said, but only knows a few of her neighbors. People have moved away over the years, many of their houses going to rental property.

Dumboski said that people come to Stanley because of the service. He didn't set out to own a hardware store, he said, it just kind of happened that way. His heart's still in his hometown. "I still believe in Levy," he said. "There's still a lot of the old folks around who I remember as a kid. I still see them in here. The rental business, which is a lot of Levy now, is good for business."

Across town from Stanley is another old-line business that plans on staying: Hogg's Meat Market. Inside are all the flavors of the fleshy rainbow. Steaks thick as "War and Peace." Raw, smoked, peppered and sugar-glazed hams. Butterflied pork chops overflowing with stuffing. Big bags of chicken tenders, made in-house. Everything but the moo, oink and cluck. Vegetarians need not apply. Just to keep everything honest and up front, one whole wall of Hogg's is covered by a long mural, a herd of placid cattle being driven to market on one end, while a herd of fat pigs roots under idyllic hills on the other.

Mike Hogg, who took over from his father, runs the place. Hogg's has been in North Little Rock for 49 years, and in its current location at 4520 Camp Robinson Road since 1976. Like Dumboski at Stanley Hardware, Hogg said it's the small-town service that keeps people coming back. "If somebody wants something cut special, we're able to do it," he said. "Lots of people have their family recipes for sausage, and we can do that. We've got lots of customers that bring their sausage seasoning in or bring a recipe, and we'll make their sausages for them." Hunters from all over Arkansas and even Texas send their kills to Hogg's to be made into their special venison jalapeno and cheese summer sausage. Hogg said he's watched the meat business shrink since taking over the business. When he was learning the trade from his dad, there were 1,500 independent meat-packing houses in Arkansas. Now there are none. He used to sell whole barbecued hogs, but the closest whole pig he can get now resides in Iowa.

Hogg hopes people will spend their money at small businesses, and tries to do the same. He goes to Wal-Mart once a year, he said, to help his grandson spend the gift cards he gets at Christmas. A few weeks back, Hogg said, he was throwing a party for one of his sons, and went to a local liquor store to buy some wine and a dozen thirty-packs of beer. When he stepped to the register, the clerk spoke up.

"She said, 'You need to go to the gas station to get your beer. It's a whole lot cheaper.' " Hogg recalls. "I said: 'No ma'am, Doug's my neighbor. He buys his meat from me, and I'm going to buy my beer from him. I don't give a damn how much it is.' "

And that, friends, is how you keep a community alive.

Equally venerable is the neighborhood of Baring Cross, west of Pike Avenue and south of Levy. The blue collar neighborhood, once home to Vestal commercial nurseries, was settled in the 1870s by the families of railroad men working at the Iron Mountain (now Union Pacific) yards and got its name from the Baring Cross railroad bridge (named for the financiers, the Baring Brothers and Judge John Cross). Cut off from the rest of North Little Rock, Baring Cross wasn't part of the city until 1905, and it's always had its own flavor. The late humorist John Fergus Ryan, in his "Argenta Memoir," recalled his ramshackle house, saying his garage moved closer to the house every time the clothesline was tightened.

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Drive through Baring Cross today and you'll see more stable home construction, attractive one-story Craftsman-styled homes built with federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds. An apartment-retail-restaurant development, Rockwater Village, is going up along the River Trail. Be careful getting there though: Baring Cross is also home to North Little Rock's first roundabout intersection, and it's a doozy.

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Living the American dream in Capitol View/Stifft Station
12/28/2011

Even though three members of the seven-person editorial staff of the Arkansas Times, including me, reside in the Capitol View/Stifft Station neighborhood, initially there was talk of unceremoniously lumping the neighborhood in with Hillcrest. People do that all the time, in my experience, and I don't like it one bit. by David Koon

I've lived south of Markham for eight years now, in a little white house with a red door on Maple Street. Our house is all of 1,000 square feet and change, just enough for me, my wife, my son, his tuba, and a 26-pound black cat. I love my home, and I love my neighborhood. Because of that I'm always ready to scrap whenever I hear somebody call it Hillcrest South.

The housing stock in Capitol View/Stifft Station is close to the same as it is up in Hillcrest. There are hills down south of Markham too, including one at Maple and Plateau that's a killer when you're walking for exercise or pleasure. The people here tend to be just as friendly as they are up in Hillcrest as well.

But — there's always a "but" when you're talking about why you love something more than somebody else loves their own thing they love — there's a whole different vibe down in Capitol View and Stifft Station: more free-flowing, more artsy, more diverse, less put together. Can you imagine, for instance, a joint like Whitewater Tavern tucked away in Hillcrest? How about the line of street-art — including a portrait of Johnny Cash, resplendent in heaven — that adorns the front of The Oyster Bar? I can't.

That vibe probably has a lot to do with the fact that Stifft Station/Capitol View is generally not as well-to-do as Hillcrest. Maybe I'm hanging with the wrong crowd, but most of the 30-somethings I know couldn't buy a house in Hillcrest without selling a kidney on the black market, so they came south a bit, where the neighborhood was a little more dicey and the houses were cheaper. The bad aspects of gentrification aside, it has allowed a whole group of younger folk, like me, to have a house with character while grabbing their little slice of the American Dream. A neighborhood fabric has been re-knit in the process.

The Capitol View and Stifft Station neighborhoods came about in a long span of rapid, early 20th century growth on what was then the Little Rock's far western edge. Stifft's Addition, conceived by prominent jeweler Charles Stifft, came first. The neighborhood, built for easy access to the major streetcar stop and a string of shops (including Stifft's jewelry store) where Markham and Kavanaugh split, was proposed to the city in 1898, though most of the first batch of houses there were built between 1905 and 1930.

The boundaries of the Capitol View and Stifft Station neighborhoods have blurred together over the years, even in the minds of many of the people who live there, but Stifft Station is a little farther out — still boxed in north and south by I-630 and Markham, though bounded by Pine in the west, and Woodrow Street in the east. The houses in Stifft Station are a bit newer vintage as well, with the majority of homes there built between 1920 and 1940.

My little house is one of those: small, but sturdy; every inside wall made of sheetrock over shiplap pine. The boards in the walls are thick and deep red-orange. The rafters in the attic are coarse, and sap-smelling in the heat of summer. They really knew how to build a house back in those days.

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I say that I love my neighborhood, and I mean it. Sometimes I drive through Stifft Station and Capitol View just for the pleasure of it. There's a thousand little marvels in any neighborhood if you'll slow down long enough to see them.

Behind The Oyster Bar, for example, the short driveway that leads up to the loading dock is paved with oyster shells — hundreds of them — tossed out the back door years ago after their inhabitants had gone on to that great oyster bed in the sky. They look like round, bleached-white stones, until you bend down and pry one out of the dirt. Only then do you catch a hint of mother of pearl, and realize that you are standing on shell.

Nearby, in the parking lot behind Pizza D'Action, heaps of glass have been swept to the edge of the pavement by the rain: shards of beer bottles, red arrowheads of broken taillight lens. In the far corner of the lot is a neat pile of shattered glass, probably from a car window or three. My guess is that nobody put it there. More than likely, that's just where Mother Nature put it, washed down over the years.

Just around the corner and up the alley, in the fenced yard behind the refinishing shop that fronts Markham, the hull of a Depression-era panel truck hunkers in the weeds, windowless, its deliveries all done.

On the corner of Brown and Seventh Streets, buried back in Capitol View, is a community garden. It's clear that a lot of love and care has been expended on that acre. In the summertime, it's common to see women in their big straw hats tending the raised beds or pushing wheelbarrows through. On an afternoon in November, it's quiet. Only a single bed of turnips and kale prove it's a place where things grow, but summer is everywhere: picnic tables, a barn with a porch, neat piles of compost and mulch, a pink wheelbarrow, a yellow shed. Smack in the middle of one bed sits a red lawn chair. It's easy to imagine some gardener sitting there in hat and gloves, willing her prizes out of the earth.

Next door to the garden is Lamar Porter Boys' Club Athletic Field — small and white, the yard out front cobbled with sandstone. Built in 1936 by the WPA and bearing a plaque from The National Register of Historic Places, the details of the little gatehouse under the bleachers are pleasingly crisp and Art Deco, crowned with twin flagpoles. Once Ray Winder Field falls to the dozers in the next year or so, Lamar Porter will be the oldest baseball stadium in the city. It's hard to imagine a more classic place to play the classic game.

It's locked up tight on a Tuesday afternoon when I stop by, but I peer in through the expanded mesh that covers the windows and walk the perimeter fence. Situated under a high roof to shade fans from the sun, the bleachers are painted the same color as the rich, green infield. The grass there looks so deep and thick and manicured, even in fall, that it makes you want to lie down in it and sleep. The pitcher's mound rests under a round rubber cover, the baselines dark with recent rain.

Standing there with my fingers hooked in the chain link, imagining the smell of popcorn and the sounds of the infield ("heybattabattabattaswingbatta"), I realize that — even as long as I've lived in the neighborhood — I've never sat in those bleachers. Never mind, I think. Lamar Porter Field will still be in the neighborhood next summer, and so will I.

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Many shades of green in Pleasant Valley
12/28/2011

In the last two decades, there's been an undercurrent of tension that hums along the western expanse of the Cantrell Road/state Highway 10 area from Interstate 430 to Chenal Parkway. It's a delicate balance between the desires of two very different forces: one that seeks the preservation of the area's natural beauty and an ideal of residential living, while the other heeds the siren's call of commercial development dollars. It's the clashing realities of country and town, with periodic eruptions that are fought in city hall and sometimes in the courtroom.

Thirty years ago, Highway 10 was a ribbon of a road that wound its way west on a scenic course parallel to the Arkansas River, past Pinnacle Mountain, the shores of Lake Maumelle and into Perry County. The two-lane passed the small black community of Pankey, a couple of liquor stores, some trailers and lots of pine trees.

Today, Highway 10 is a principal arterial (the largest road designation below an interstate) for the city to points west. A drive along the corridor offers a variety of views. Great cliffs of stone rise up at sharp angles from the road, covered thickly with trees, which give way to gently rolling hills. Split rail fences along the highway frontage add a country air, as this piece of Arkansas River valley land gives way to the early foothills of the Ouachita Mountains.

On the residential front, there's a mixture of housing types, from upscale apartments and million-dollar mansions to the occasional ramshackle house with rusted cars parked in the yard.

The first major development in this part of West Little Rock, Pleasant Valley was once part of a horse farm owned by Charles Taylor, who bought the first 90-acre tract near the intersection of Highway 10 and Rodney Parham Road (then called Perryville Loop Road) in 1929. During the next 30 years, Taylor would purchase 52 adjoining parcels, for a total of about 1,200 acres. He sold 1,100 acres to R.A. Lile, Ernest Phillips and Sam Rowland in 1959, and Pleasant Valley Inc. was formed. Future Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller was reportedly an early investor.

The first homes were built in the mid-1960s and the neighborhood was completely developed by the '70s, for a total of about 1,000 homes. Today, Pleasant Valley boasts large lots with mature hardwood trees, rolling hills populated with pine trees and about 50 acres of dedicated green space. There are two swimming pools, one on Hidden Valley and one on Arkansas Valley; both have been renovated within the last decade. There are also tennis courts and two playgrounds. A small creek that runs along the backyards of homes on Happy Valley Drive provides unstructured play for kids on the block. The Pleasant Valley Property Owners Association is responsible for maintaining the green space and amenities.

Adjacent to the neighborhood is the Pleasant Valley Country Club, a private club with a 27-hole championship golf course.

The original 90-acre parcel that served as the Taylor homestead was later developed into office space that at one time housed Systematics and Alltel, and is now the home of Fidelity Information systems and the headquarters of Windstream Communications.

Farther west on Highway 10 are the Pleasant Forest and Walton Heights neighborhoods.

These rooftops, especially the ones that cover the well-heeled residents of neighborhoods Chenal Valley and Valley Falls Estates, attracted a variety of commercial developers with plans for office buildings and shopping centers in the early part of the 21st century.

But it's not just the residential developments that fuel commercial growth. Among the 100,000 square-foot office giants on Highway 10 are a call center for AT&T Wireless; FamilyLife, a part of Campus for Crusade for Christ; and Leisure Arts, the giant publisher of how-to instructional books on needlecrafts and home decor. The three combined employ upwards of 1,000 people, and restaurants, gas stations, banks and retail stores have flocked to the area.

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The for sale signs and bulldozers began to change the bucolic nature of the area, to the dismay of some residents and activists who were — and still are — concerned about traffic and destruction of old-growth trees in favor of sterile concrete and glass structures.

Residents overflowed the city board meeting room in 2004 when a Walmart Supercenter was approved at the corner of Highway 10 and Chenal. Despite the city's requirements for landscaping and a more "upscale" look than the retailer's usual buildings, neighbors complained the extra traffic (estimated at 3,000-4,000 more cars a day at the time) and the big box nature of the store wasn't a good fit for the community, which would drive down property values.

It was at about the same time as the Supercenter opening that retail development in the corridor hit full speed, with more than 320,000 square feet of retail and office space built on Highway 10 between 2005 and 2006, not including Lou Schickel's Pleasant Ridge Town Center, which was another city hall showdown.

The city had approved a planned retail development on a parcel of land Schickel owned at Highway 10 and Pleasant Ridge Road, but in 2003, Schickel began acquiring residential property on the hillside behind the parcel with the intent of building a full-blown lifestyle center, modeled after outdoor centers in Atlanta, instead of just a typical strip center. His goal was to land a major, upscale department store as the main anchor with a major bookstore and a Whole Foods as the secondary anchors. Smaller, upscale national tenants would round out the plan.

The opposition to the rezoning was virulent, with concerns about traffic as the No. 1 objection. After a series of heated planning commission and city board meetings, the revised plan was finally approved. The center opened in 2006 with Parisian and Fresh Market as the anchors. Several national chain restaurants new to Little Rock landed there, while the majority of the smaller tenants relocated from shopping centers in other parts of the city.

Between Pleasant Ridge and Walmart, there are several other nodes of commercial development, most of them roughly 2 miles apart. Between these lie standalone office or residential buildings or undeveloped land. It's what planners point to in the face of criticism over the area's development: The master zoning plan is working.

A master zoning plan for the area was adopted by the city in 1986. The master plan created commercial nodes at certain intersections with residential areas and transition zones (land zoned for office or multifamily use) in between the nodes. In 1995, the city approved a design overlay district for the corridor, which outlines landscaping requirements and limits access points on the highway.

The plan was the city's attempt to stop the "domino effect" seen on Rodney Parham, University and Asher Avenues, where commercial development on these roads forced residents out.

No one can talk about the master plan without mentioning National Home Centers, and the time a zoning battle went from city hall to the courtroom.

In 1993, the Little Rock Board of Directors voted 4-2 to rezone 17.7 acres of residential land on Highway 10 for commercial use, a vote that went against the recommendations of city staff and the planning commission. The rezoning effort, spearheaded by David Jones, was to pave the way for a National Home Centers big box store. Three years before, Jones led a successful bid to rezone a parcel of land at Highway 10 and Taylor Loop Road for the Harvest Foods store that later failed. (The Harvest Foods building would be home to an upscale furniture store in the early 2000s, but now sits empty as the city considers a proposal by Easter Seals to move its adult training facilities there, a move area residents support.)

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Gene Pfeifer, president of OneSource Building and Home centers, along with other opponents of the 1993 rezoning, filed suit in Pulaski County Circuit Court. Judge Vann Smith reversed the board's decision, describing the vote as "spot zoning incompatible with the city's land-use plan." The state Supreme Court upheld Smith's ruling on appeal.

Pfeifer said at the time that had the city succeeded in approving the National Home Center project, "it would have torpedoed the Highway 10 plan."

Despite assurances from city planners that the master plan works, residents are ever vigilant to any new development proposal in the area. Even as late as September, neighbors were voicing objections to proposed commercial rezoning applications.

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Past winners of the Musicians Showcase play Stickyz
12/28/2011

Plus the 31st anniversary of Nightflying at Stickyz, the Ugly Sweater Party at Revolution, Cool Shoes at Downtown, Dash Rip Rock at Stickyz, WWE Smackdown at Verizon, Hosty Duo at Stickyz and ZoZo at Revolution by Robert Bell

WEDNESDAY 12/28

NIGHTFLYING 31ST ANNIVERSARY PARTY

7 p.m. Stickyz. $10.

Good old Nightflying magazine is celebrating its 31st anniversary with — what else? — a gigantic rock show. The publication has had a few other birthday blowouts in recent weeks, in Hot Springs and Fort Smith, and now, in Little Rock. The lineup for the capital city show includes Grateful Dead tribute artists The Schwag, long-running folk duo Trout Fishing in America, psych-blues cosmonauts Tyrannosaurus Chicken, party band par excellence Tragikly White, the blues stalwarts in The Joe Pitts Band, R&B and blues from Salt & Pepper and, of course, the man himself, publisher Peter Read. The Point 94.1's Jeff Allen will serve as master of ceremonies.

WEDNESDAY 12/28

UGLY SWEATER PARTY

8 p.m. Revolution. $6.

Remember all those hideous Christmas sweaters you always got from Aunt Matilda (even though you specifically asked her for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for Gameboy)? Well, let's hope you hung on to at least one of those awful things, because here's where that crummy gift can finally come in handy. Wear your most dreadful holiday abomination and bring at least two nonperishable food items to this all-ages show, a benefit for Arkansas Food Bank. You can also catch some tunes from Booyah! Dad, The Ginsu Wives, Ezra Lbs., Many Persian Z's and The Alpha Ray.

THURSDAY 12/29

MUSICIANS SHOWCASE PAST WINNERS

9 p.m. Stickyz.

So the 2012 Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase is coming up, and it's the 20th anniversary of the event. That's a lot of bands over the years, and the crew here at Times HQ decided it'd be kinda cool to put together a show with some of the previous years' winners. The Big Cats (1997 champs) probably need no introduction, but just in case, the band's been playing hook-filled rock 'n' roll for nearly as long as the showcase has been around and just released "The Ancient Art of Leaving: High & Low," the first of a two-part album. Adrian Tillman — a.k.a. 607 (2008 winner) — is the tireless renaissance man of the Central Arkansas hip hop scene, whose latest album, "Yik3s!" came out this fall. Brother Andy & His Big Damn Mouth took the prize in 2010 with their burly, awesomely vulgar power-pop gems. It's an 18-and-older show, so you can bring along your little cousin, sibling, niece or nephew who's home from college over the winter break. The 2012 showcase starts Jan. 26. The entries have been rolling in, and we'll let you know early next month which acts made the semi-finals.

FRIDAY 12/30

COOL SHOES END OF THE YEAR PARTY

9 p.m. Downtown Music Hall. $5 before 10 p.m., $7 after.

This is the last Cool Shoes dance party this year, and it's an all-ages affair, with DJs Wolf-e-Wolf, Kichen, Rysk and Cam Holifield pumping out the music, as well as a free party photo booth and promises of special surprises all night. I'll go ahead and cop to not totally "getting" contemporary electronic dance music. A lot of it sounds like squeaky, squiggly bad-trip nightmare videogame music to my delicate old-man ears, which nowadays can't handle anything more raucous than early Wilco. Just kidding. But in all seriousness, last week, Rock Candy reader "furobertbell" reminded me of something via the comments section: "Robert, you have for the umpteenth time made it abundantly clear that you like only what YOU like and are truly no real fan of music." Presumably it's bad to only like the music you like. You should also like the music you don't like. Furthermore, my "write ups are either bitter, closed minded reflections of something you have NO business covering or a very sad attempt at humor." Wow. Harsh, but completely, 100 percent true. So it was with that withering indictment in mind that I endeavored to check out some of this electro/dubstep/moombahton/what-have-you. I certainly don't like it, and probably have NO business covering it, so it would be a natural fit for my column. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Soundcloud. I found a lot of stuff that didn't seem that far off from Black Dice or Excepter or Wolf Eyes or various other noise and experimental acts I've enjoyed over the years. I listened to some mixes by Wolf-e-Wolf and Kichen and I'll be damned if I didn't end up liking several of them quite a bit. In particular, I thought Kichen's track "HORRORS" was rad — it was jarring and brutal and felt like your brain was being jackhammered. Plus I'm told that the Cool Shoes folks have a colossal sound system and that it's all about getting your innards jostled by the massive bass. So props to commenter furobertbell. Thanks to him or her, I finally like some music that I don't like. But wait — if I didn't like it, but now I like it, then that means I'm back to only liking the music that I like. Dagnabbit!

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FRIDAY 12/30

DASH RIP ROCK

9:30 p.m. Stickyz. $6.

Of all the bands that have had the "cow-punk" label pinned to them over the years, none of them lived up to that description more than South Louisiana's Dash Rip Rock. For a good primer on the band's overall sound, check out "Hits and Giggles" from back in 2000. It's got 23 compact little ditties perfect for getting hopped up on cheap hooch and going out to raise some hell. "Let's Go Smoke Some Pot" is a Gen-X update of "Let's Go to the Hop" that name-checks every Lollapalooza-bound band of the day, with just a hint of punk-rock disdain. The band has progressed from those early roots-rock ragers, though. Take, for example, 2007's "Hee Haw Hell," a concept record about a hillbilly who dies while partying and makes purgatorial layovers in the various circles of Hell, including a world where "Punk Rock Never Happened," which bears an unsettling resemblance to our own. Despite some lineup changes, Dash Rip Rock has been at it forever, so if you like hanging out at that amphetamine-addled intersection where punk rock and country meet, get into a dustup and then make nice and become best friends, don't miss this chance to see one of the genre's originators.

TUESDAY 1/3

WWE SMACKDOWN

7 p.m. Verizon Arena. $17-$62.

Did you know that professional wrestling buffs have their own incredibly detailed jargon that they use? It's crazy. For example, from a January 2010 Wrestlezone forum titled, "Randy Orton: Face or Tweener?": "So my question is what would you do? Keep Orton a heel for a heel vs. heel feud, turn him into a full-fledged babyface, or maybe try for that SCSA type character once again ... but do it right this time? IMO I would have him a Tweener, keep him as that SCSA kinda guy and try to propel him into the next level. Some smark fans cheer for him anyway and he has been getting more cheers as of late, however his last face turn was horrible and I think he has done too much heelish things to be a face [sic throughout]." I'll try to translate some of this. Here goes: So Orton used to be a "heel" (bad guy) but eventually became a "babyface," or "face" (good guy), but for a little while there he was a "tweener" (neither good nor bad). "SCSA" refers to retired wrestling champ "Stone Cold" Steve Austin. A "smark" is a fan who knows wrestling is all scripted and likes it anyway, and it's a variation on the term "mark," which variously refers to people who think wrestling is real; wrestlers or others in the industry who are overly concerned with fan perception; or, pejoratively, self-proclaimed wrestling experts who actually don't know a damn thing. A "turn" is a change in a wrestler's persona from good to bad or vice versa. So besides the insider lingo, there are the convoluted storylines, which seem to be at least as hard to keep up with as most soap operas. Anyways, this right here is being billed as The First Smackdown of 2012, in which "The Apex Predator" Randy Orton takes on "The World's Strongest Man" Mark Henry AND "The World's Largest Athlete" Big Show in some sort of three-way match, with special refereeing by Booker T. Also appearing will be: "Captain Charisma" Christian, "The Celtic Warrior" Sheamus, Wade Barrett, "Dashing" Cody Rhodes, Ted Dibiase Jr., Ezekiel Jackson, Daniel Bryan, Justin Gabriel, Natalya, Alicia Fox and more.

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FRIDAY 1/6

HOSTY DUO

9:30. Stickyz. $6.

This Norman, Okla., act has for several years now been trafficking in stripped-down blues, with plenty of twang, occasional harmonica and kazoo and an ever-so-slightly alt-country kinda vibe that's super relaxed. The band's overall sound is not unlike The Black Keys, if The Black Keys were a bit more laid back and into the country blues and unconcerned with conquering the wider world. That's not to imply that Mike Hosty and Mike Byars are in any way idle. Indeed, it seems that they are rarely still for more than 15 minutes or so. In 2011 alone, Hosty played a staggering 250-something concerts, weddings, parties, barbecues, get-togethers, shindigs and one-man-shows. Damn! Is there a harder working man in Oklahoma showbiz whose name isn't Wayne Coyne? It seems unlikely. Make sure and get there early, because the Cotton Bowl's on the TV for all ya'll who aren't driving down to Jerry World to see Arkansas take on Kansas State. It's an 18-and-older show, and if you get there before halftime, you don't have to pay the cover.

SATURDAY 1/7

ZOSO (Led Zeppelin tribute)

9 p.m. Revolution. $10.

Look: there are Led Zeppelin people and there are Black Sabbath people. That's just the way that it is, and I won't go into all the reasons why some folks might be drawn to one over the other. But I am a through-and-through, till-the-day-I-die Sabbath freak. "Observe the Sabbath" might be God's fourth commandment, but on my own personal stone tablets it's No. 1, forever and ever amen. I think Zep is OK and all — and the third album is great — but I just don't think you can love both bands. You can like both of them, or you can like one and love the other, but nobody's heart is big enough to honestly love both of those bands. This is a source of some friction in my house, but that's probably getting too personal. Moving on, a few years back I saw a Sabbath tribute band, which will remain nameless, and even though I really wanted it to be good, it was dreadful. Their Geezer was OK and their Bill Ward was OK and their Tony Iommi was OK, but their Ozzy was missing some fingers, and more importantly, he couldn't sing like Ozzy. On the other hand, Zoso is, by all accounts, transcendently awesome, the members bearing uncanny resemblances to their real-world counterparts in Zep, plus they can play like them, which is really saying something because even though my heart belongs to Sabbath, John Bonham is hands down the greatest rock drummer ever — maybe even the only rock drummer ever. So while I pine away for a great Sab tribute, I'll be very happy for all you Zepheads out there, losing your minds as Zoso soars through "Into the Light" and "Over the Hills and Far Away" and all your other faves.

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A look back at 2011
12/28/2011

by Tommy Durham

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The River Market: Raised from the dead
12/28/2011

Nearly 15 years after what we know today as the River Market district was born, it's still a neighborhood without a clear identity. by Lindsey Millar

Nearly 15 years after what we know today as the River Market district was born, it's still a neighborhood without a clear identity. Is it where Central Arkansas goes to drink? The cultural capital of the state? An actual neighborhood where people live and work and buy things? It depends on when and where you look.

I look on it from the perspective of someone who spends most of his time there. I don't live in the River Market district, but I may as well. Five days a week, I park my car with other cars owned by people who don't care about them under an I-30 exit ramp in a parking lot covered in pigeon scat and broken glass. From there, it's a three-block walk to Arkansas Times HQ: Across the trolley tracks and by a passing trolley, pretty to look at but always empty. Past the five-story main branch of the Central Arkansas Library System, with the names of canonical writers etched in the top of the building — Dickinson, Faulkner, Thucydides — that always remind me that I should be reading better books. Across what may be Little Rock's most complicated traffic arrangement, which in a short span brings together four on/off ramp lanes into a three-way intersection governed by rules that are broken nearly every time the light turns green. Down a pea gravel path through the latest territory the Historic Arkansas Museum has claimed for its fort of historic preservation and resurrection, where even in triple digit heat this summer the resident blacksmith stoked the fire inside in his dark forge.

My second-floor office looks out onto the intersection of Markham and Scott and the Main Street Bridge. Almost 300 years ago in the same spot, Chester Ashley, then probably the richest man in Arkansas, looked out onto the Arkansas River idling by from his front porch. At some point, the Arkansas Gazette spent 50 years in the same intersection, the mid-point of a Newspaper Row that stretched from the Old State House down through what's now President Clinton Avenue. My great-great grandfather Alexander Millar, who edited and published the Arkansas Methodist, might've once penned Anti-Saloon League editorials mere blocks from where I now put out at least a couple issues a year celebrating Little Rock bars.

In 1985, when the Times moved into the newly renovated Heritage West Building, the River Market didn't exist and wouldn't for more than a decade. Locals called the area Old Town or the East Markham Warehouse District. The only business in the district served as a ready metaphor for how dead Old Town was — a casket store.

The redevelopment boom that finally came in the mid-'90s was a product of the vision of people like Jimmy Moses, who sketched out an early version of the River Market building after visiting the Pike Place Market in Seattle; Bobby Roberts, who plotted the Main Library's move into the old Fones Brothers Warehouse before any plan for the River Market existed, and master politicians like Dean Kumpuris and Buddy Villines. But the key spark was public money. All the early major development that kick-started the River Market district was primarily funded from an assortment of city, county, state and federal funds.

In the early days of the development, itself only a piece of a sweeping project that led to the construction of what's now called the Verizon Arena, the renovation of the Statehouse Convention Center and the relocation and expansion of the Museum of Discovery, there were complaints — in this paper, believe it or not — about the lack of private support. Today, with much of the institutional groundwork laid and fresh off a successful public-private partnership that led to the reclamation of the old Rock Island Railroad Bridge as a pedestrian crossing, the tension is over what the neighborhood is, rather than what it's going to be.

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The initial vision, like all New Urbanist revivals, called for a mix of retail, housing, parks, dining and entertainment. Retailers have given it a go. When I first moved to Little Rock a decade ago, retail shops Take a Hike and Vesta's occupied space in the first block of what's now Clinton Avenue. Today, aside from 10,000 Villages and an office furniture store, the neighborhood doesn't have a retail store that's not an outgrowth of some larger institution (like the Central Arkansas Library System or the Clinton Library).

As for park land, more than 30 acres rolls along beside the river: There's a sculpture promenade that doubles as a stretch of the River Trail; La Petite Roche (the actual Little Rock, worth a visit if only to marvel at all the fuss — and money spent — over such a dinky rock); maybe the city's best playground at Peabody Park, with boulders to climb, tunnels to explore and a massive play-fountain to run through; the newly opened Bill Clark Presidential Park Wetlands, with walkways snaking through a river backwash below the Clinton Library, and the two former railroad bridges smartly reclaimed for pedestrian use.

Thanks to River Market godfather Jimmy Moses and his business partner Rett Tucker there are plenty of places to live high in the sky in the neighborhood, though probably only for those making more money than most of us. NBA star and Little Rock native Joe Johnson has a two-story condo in the 300 Third Tower that has a shark tank in it. I suspect no one lives higher in the River Market district. Down on the goldfish-bowl end of the housing spectrum, a number of area warehouses have been converted into lofts.

Unfortunately, despite a number of failed attempts, there's nowhere within walking distance for neighborhood dwellers to buy groceries or fill a prescription (a new grocery is supposedly coming soon to the recently revived Third Street corridor). There are, however, dozens of restaurants nearby. In the River Market's Ottenheimer Hall, the cornerstone for all the development that followed in the River Market district, none of the original vendors remain, though there's a nice multicultural balance. It's not quite the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, but on Saturdays during warm weather months, when farmers, trinket hawkers, busking musicians and clowns on stilts who make balloon animals pack under the pavilions behind the hall for the Little Rock Farmers Market, no place in the city is more alive.

Except maybe for a trip down President Clinton Avenue on a weekend night. Muscle cars and neon motorcycles inch along with no clear destination beyond a continuous loop. On the sidewalks, it's not hard to win at River Market district bingo: B for a bachelorette party (you can spot the bride-to-be by her tiara of condoms or some other embarrassing accoutrement); I for the impaired, walking in a zigzag; N for New Era cap-wearing, would-be rappers selling homemade CDs; G for gawkers, the pedestrian version of the cars that cruise past, people — often underage — just there to see the sights, and O for overcrowded clubs, with clumps of folks huddled near the entrances, texting furiously as they wait to get inside.

In the 20-odd blocks that comprise the broadest conception of the neighborhood, at least 10 restaurants or bars cater to drinkers with hours that extend beyond dinner service, and there are at least half a dozen more restaurants that serve booze. Want to see a concert by a touring band? Odds are you're coming to Clinton Avenue, where the largest and most active bar/venues operate and at least half a dozen other bars regularly feature live music. Want to see a handful of big-named nostalgia acts? Odds are you're among the quarter million or so who descend on the River Market district annually on Memorial Day weekend for Riverfest.

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In the daytime, it's easier to make a case for the district as the cultural heart of the capital city. Most of Little Rock's museums sit within a few blocks of each other in the neighborhood, with the Clinton Library cantilevered over the banks of the Arkansas River in all its modernist glory on the eastern edge. Nearby, Heifer Village's exhibits on global poverty and hunger attract tourists and visiting school kids by the busload. Want to see art, buy Arkansas crafts, get a smoothie or research your Arkansas roots? Head to the Central Arkansas Library's sprawling campus of artfully renovated historic buildings where, at least for the near future, you can also check out books.

I'm sure it's not without precedent for a city's nightlife and cultural districts to live together in tight quarters, but I can't think of any other examples. It's not always easy for the night and day sides of the neighborhood to live together. Pushes by some in the entertainment community to close Clinton Avenue off on weekend evenings a la Beale Street have thus far not gotten very far. Ditto for an application by new River Market district tenant Juanita's to serve alcohol until 5 a.m. The glass I park on every morning isn't good for either constituency. But still the people come. And the teen-aged neighborhood hums with life.

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Maumelle hitting growth spurt
12/28/2011

At 7:20 a.m. on a recent Wednesday, cars crawled along Maumelle Boulevard. by Frank Brady

At 7:20 a.m. on a recent Wednesday, cars crawled along Maumelle Boulevard.

To reach Interstate 430 or Interstate 40, Maumelle residents have to travel the four-lane Maumelle Boulevard. Drivers heading east jockey through the traffic hoping to shave a few minutes off what should normally take 10 minutes to reach the freeway.

This is Maumelle, a city just north of the Arkansas River from Little Rock and to the west of North Little Rock, and one of the fastest growing cities in Arkansas in the last decade. Between 2000 and 2010, its population jumped nearly 63 percent, to 17,163.

I was one of the people who helped Maumelle grow. Moving from Little Rock, I bought a three-bedroom home near the city's Jess Odom Community Center in 2006. I, like thousands of others, was drawn to the city because of the friendly vibe, convenient access to grocery stores and outdoor activities.

Maumelle has been accused of being a place built for whites fleeing Little Rock to avoid living next to blacks. But that's not the case.

Years ago, people would have probably said the same thing about Cabot and Conway. Maumelle residents don't seem to discriminate, and blacks and whites live side by side on the same streets without a second thought.

In fact, the black population of Maumelle is 12.1 percent, compared to the statewide average of 15.4 percent, according to the 2010 U.S. Census Bureau.

What attracts people to the town are the large homes and sprawling yards in quiet neighborhoods and outdoor activities for residents, ranging from a skateboard park to seemingly endless walking trails.

From first-time homebuyers to retirees, people are finding their way into the city with street names such as Arnold Palmer, Trevino and Par Drive. But Maumelle isn't for everyone. Young adults fresh out of college who enjoy the bright lights with bars and a movie theater, might think twice about Maumelle: It has none of those attractions.

Home values have remained stable over recent years, unlike some areas in the country that have been hammered by falling housing prices, said Lisa Holloway-Sugg, a real estate agent for Crye-Leike Realtors. The median value of a home in Maumelle was around $195,000 in 2009.

And Mayor Michael Watson said he's encouraged by the number of housing permits. In 2011, 68 permits had been issued through the end of September, just one fewer than in all of 2010.

The founding father of Maumelle is Jess P. Odom. Odom's vision was for the city to include all people from "all socio-economic levels," said Ed Dozier, Maumelle's first resident in the early 1970s.

Odom, who made his money in the insurance industry, paid about $1 million for the land that would become the city of Maumelle and received funding through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Dozier said. It was one of 13 "New Towns" that popped up across the country in the early 1970s, according to the city of Maumelle.

In the 1970s, people started trickling into Maumelle for the same reasons that people come today. "It sits away from the city ... and yet it's close enough for people to live in an almost pristine environment out in the country," Dozier said.

These days, a handful of joggers start their day at 5:30 a.m. at Lake Willastein, a 100-acre park with a 55-acre lake as its centerpiece. Joggers along with bikers and walkers move around the 2-mile cement path around the park, but the trail also snakes its way around the city. The 26-mile route takes walkers through subdivisions and along Maumelle Boulevard to the city's second lake, Lake Valencia. This lake features a fountain and dock for fishing and is next to the Maumelle Public Library, which is part of the Central Arkansas Library System.

The park also has an amphitheater for such events as the annual Maumelle Family Fest and a skateboard park near the Jess P. Odom Community Center, a magnet for gym rats with an indoor basketball court, walking track and an outside swimming pool.

For other outdoor activities, the Maumelle Country Club touts tennis courts and an 18-hole championship golf course.

Maumelle is devoid of rundown houses or overgrown yards. In the summer on any of the winding streets, there's usually a gathering of middle-school children, either talking or playing a game. Their parents are usually close by, mowing the grass or pulling weeds in their flowerbed.

This fall, Maumelle opened the $55 million Maumelle High School. The town's first high school opened with 900 students. It has a 185-seat room for seminars and a 2,000-seat gymnasium.

Education is important to the residents of Maumelle. About half of the city's population who are over 25 have a bachelor's degree or higher. Across the state, only 18.3 percent of people have a bachelor's degree or higher.

When the sun sets in Maumelle, the residents who want to enjoy the bar scene go to the River Market district in Little Rock. But there are plenty of places to eat, and a Starbucks just off of Maumelle Boulevard to grab a cup of coffee.

Traffic

There's hope that Maumelle's traffic will improve in the next couple of years. The city of Maumelle is proposing a new interchange on Interstate 40 which will provide another entry into the city. The interchange is in its early phases, but Watson said he hopes to have a design for a project done by August 2013. In the meantime, Watson said, he will search for funding for the $15 million work.

If the interchange is opened, "I'm not going to say that it would make us more attractive. [But] it would alleviate one of the major problems that we have," Watson said.

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Information for Hot Springs, Arkansas

Hot Springs, AR

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Latitude: 34.497138 -- Longitude: -93.055393

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Judge acts to stop bogus tax credit scheme 12/29/2011

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