Hotel Pines

The Hotel Pines is apart of our series The City Left Behind: Pine Bluff, AR Season 1. Above you will find a trailer for the series. This location can be found in . Click here to view the playlists and subscribe to keep up with each episode!

Mankind has always carried within himself the innate desire to shape and mold the world around us to our own personal desires and likings – even when the steps required in doing so are of epic proportions and huge in nature.  We build over-land canals in order to connect oceans. We fashion massive levies so that we can change the courses of mighty rivers. We create gargantuan dams in our efforts to create bodies of water where before there were none. We erect towering bridges that connect opposing shores together to facilitate our desire to cross from one side to the other with maximum ease.

And we make buildings. And while every building that we construct carries with it its own purpose, sometimes the purposes of our buildings are more grand and sweeping than at other times, and such was the case with the Hotel Pines.

Pine Bluff around the turn of the century was experiencing an economic boom of success on the north side of the train tracks and it was the business owners and leaders that got together to extend this “boundary” of economic success to the south side of thee tracks. Hotel Pines was one of the first ideas on the drawing board.

George R. Man, the architect who designed the Arkansas State Capitol, was selected for the design of the hotel. Paul M. Heerwagen, whose experience included work on such hotels as the Piedmont in Atlanta, was selected to decorate the interior. It was a six-story, U-shaped structure with fine classical detailing. The interior of the first floor was supported by a full entablature, mounted on pink marbleized columns. The lobby was a barrel vault supported by gray marble columns and pilasters while its ceiling consisted of curved multicolored lead stained-glass skylights. The walls were furnished in gray marble, and the floors were mosaic ceramic tile.

The first name to grace the register of the new Hotel Pines was Al H. Wilson from ‘The Rolling Stone’. At the time he was one of the best-known singing stars of the early 20th Century,  along with his comedy company. Manager E. D. Gonzales welcomed all the guests with his usual friendly demeanor. At the time only a handful of rooms were ready to be occupied and there was still much work to be done throughout the building before a formal opening could be done.

But the day after the soft launch opening of the first three floors, a tragedy occurred. A gas explosion ended up injuring Walter Jones, Frank Guest and Engineer Wallace. The cause was an employee had turned on the gas before the connections had been made. It had left all three men with burns and occurred in the boiler room of the hotel. Thankfully it did no damage to the building itself

A crew of about 75 men worked day and night to put the finishing touches on the hotel. One of the best features of the hotel was the custom telephone switchboard constructed by the Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company. Elevators were installed which was considered a luxury for 1913 and goes to show that no cost was skimped for this magnificent structure.

The official grand opening of the Hotel Pines was on November 6, 1913. Arkansas Governor George Washington Hays was there, Louis J. Wortham delivering the principal speaker, Hon. W. F. Coleman toastmaker and more. Just after the grand opening, the new manager E.D. Gonzalez quit. The reason for his resignation was not made public and it was speculated that P. G. Storm or M.D. Watson would take over.

Regarded as one of the finest hotels in Arkansas and located near the Union Station, the hotel offered one of the most convenient facilities in regards to the city’s incoming railroad passenger traffic, even going as far as offering porter service to carry baggage to the hotel from the train station. The Hotel Pines quickly became the location of the town’s most prestigious society balls, dances, banquets, and business and civic meetings.

One article from 1918 quotes, “The reputation of having the “finest hotel in this section” is a good thing for Pine Bluff. Residents of other places who know little of this city naturally conclude-and rightly-that a city with such a hotel as the Hotel Pines is a progressive prosperous community.

It indicated, too, the obligation that rests upon Pine Bluff people, who benefit directly and indirectly from the reputation for excellence made by the Hotel Pines, to give their support to the institution. 

And by support is meant, financial support – whenever you take a meal away from home, eat it at the Hotel Pines; patronize the Hotel Pines cigar stand, barber shop and other places of business located in the Hotel Pines building. Thats the kind of support that counts.”

The hotel lived through many different eras of Pine Bluff’s history, one of them being through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The hotel at the time was a segregated space for Whites only. From 1960-1964 African American citizens started the ‘Sit In Movement’ which involved sitting and refusing to leave establishments that had claimed themselves to be segregated spaces. This was to protest the outrageous times of inequality in America. In 1963 the movement had spread through Pine Bluff, news articles tell of multiple groups of dozens of African American citizens being arrested for staging the protests at the Hotel Pines and in front of the Saenger Theater.

Decline of Hotel Pines

Another change came in 1968 when the hotel began to decline due to the loss of the passenger rail in the city. The grand and eloquent hotel that had at one time successfully survived and ridden out of The Great Depression of the 1930s, eventually found itself becoming an indirect victim to the rise of the easily traversable interstates that had also laid waste to the passenger railway industry. Thus deprived of its primary clientele, the historic hotel’s business fell rapidly, never to rise again. The hotel which had operated for fifty-seven years, found itself closing and locking its doors in 1970.

A few scattered businesses made periodic attempts at setting up shop and doing business within the hotel’s street front over the following years. It was even added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 10, 1979, in an attempt to help preserve the structure but unfortunately, it didn’t have any huge effects. Retailers such as Gordon’s Jewelers, which set up shop there in 1981, have done their best to make a go within the otherwise abandoned building. Although for the most part, the hotel has remained sadly vacant.

The City Of Pine Bluff itself considered tearing the structure down in 1990. This fate was narrowly avoided when a highly dedicated local non-profit group (the Citizens United To Save The Pines) purchased the aging facility. Once again it fell into loving hands and it was the group’s desire and purpose to both preserve the cherished the landmark to restore it to its former state of majesty.

Over the next twelve years, the Hotel Pines gradually began to resemble itself once again as the group cleaned the building, replaced the roof, installed new windows, and renovated the stained-glass domed ceiling of the lobby. Desiring only for the hotel to live on and to enjoy the same prosperity that it had in decades past. The group sold it in 2003 to Davidson Properties (of Jacksonville, Arkansas), for a sum of just ten dollars. At the time of the transaction, Davidson Properties had planned on spending eighteen months in completing the hotel’s renovations with an investment of three million dollars into the completion of the project, their ultimate goal being to make the hotel available for offices, business suites, and seventy-five upscale hotel rooms. To date, the redevelopment and renovation as planned by the facility’s latest owner, Davidson Properties, sadly still remains on the drawing board. The Hotel Pines, the City of Pine Bluff, and all of its people remain patiently optimistic.

Gallery Below of Hotel Pines

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