Photographers Hope To Save Pine Bluff’s Historic Hotel Pines

A group of photographers is working to document a long-closed, historic hotel in Pine Bluff. It was once considered among the finest in Arkansas, but has been abandoned for nearly half a century and after a hard winter, the once grand structure is deteriorating fast.

The two story lobby, with marble walls and plaster ornamentation is crumbling. The curved ceiling once featured stained glass, but that’s broken, allowing water to pour in.

“When we’ve shown it to people in the past, people were kind of astounded. But what’s so fun about this is bringing people in here and having them take their first look at the lobby. It’s pretty astounding isn’t it? You get in here and you just go ‘wow!’ And then you leave it and it feels sort of sad that you’ve left it alone again,” said Rita Henry, who leads Blue-Eyed Knocker Photo Club.

The hotel was designed by architect George R. Mann, who also worked on the Arkansas State Capitol, the Hotel Marion, the Boyle Building and the Arkansas Gazette building.

On the second floor of the Hotel Pines are meeting rooms and a ballroom that hosted some of Pine Bluff’s key social events.

“It opened in 1913 and we actually got in to start doing the photography around October, so it’s been about a hundred years,” Henry said as a passing train outside was blasting its horn, giving a hint to the history of the building.

The hotel was built near the tracks, a short distance from the Pine Bluff’s Union Station.

“It was probably one of the finest hotels in Arkansas at the time and I think it’s really interesting that you see it kind of tracks with the development patterns of Pine Bluff,” said Vanessa McKuin, executive director of the Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas, who got her first look at the hotel this past weekend.

“So when Pine Bluff was booming, the Hotel Pines was booming. When the railroad passenger service stopped on the railroad in 1968, that’s when you really saw kind of a decline of the Hotel Pines because that’s where the major client base came from, that passenger railway. Once that passenger service shut down, the Hotel Pines shut down shortly after that.”

The six story hotel, at the corner of Main Street and 5th Avenue, featured retail shops on the ground floor and rooms for all price ranges on the upper floors. While there are large luxury suites, some rooms, especially on the higher floors, are the size of dorm rooms with shared bathrooms.

Who is working to restore this architectural treasure? Can it be achieved after decades of broken promises? If it is restored, how might it be used? Read more of KUAR news director Michael Hibblen’s report at this link.