Financial Quarter Planned to Revitalize More of Downtown Little Rock

An aerial view of the area being branded as the Financial Quarter. 

With hopes of revitalizing more of downtown Little Rock, studioMAIN is leading an effort to create the Financial Quarter, an area stretching from Sixth Street to the Arkansas River and Main Street to Broadway.

According to Glen Woodruff, director of business development for Wittenberg Delony & Davidson Architects and the studioMAIN coordinator for the project, the goal of the Financial Quarter is to draw people out of their offices and on to the streets. He said that right now, employees go into the parking decks, take the elevator to their offices and leave when 5 p.m. comes around.

“They never come out in the street, they never engage the retail opportunities that are downtown and in the River Market and as a result, what we’re calling the Financial Quarter sort of dried up over the years,” Woodruff said. “That used to be the center of town, and it’s not any more.”

In order to create this atmosphere, the nonprofit studioMAIN and stakeholders in the Financial Quarter began meeting in May 2014 to formulate ideas and plans for what could take place in the area. Stakeholders include property mangers, investors and volunteer engineers and architects that make up the studioMAIN group.

The ideas for improvement range from colorful crosswalks and street furniture and art to new retail and restaurants in the currently underutilized bank lobbies.

“Those bank lobbies used to be full of people during the day and they’re not anymore — people bank on their phones and on their computers,” Woodruff said. “So there’s these empty spaces sitting down there, and they are urban deserts in the daytime. But they’re phenomenal spaces, there’s great opportunity, and we think that we can redesign those and repurpose those bank lobbies and the plazas that most of them have adjacent to them and really become viable retail establishments.”

Initially, Woodruff said these ideas could come to fruition through various “pop up” events. These could feature retail vendors, restaurants, live music and more, all while emphasizing the new Financial Quarter brand.

“It reinvigorates people and shows them the potential when you do it from a pop up standpoint,” Woodruff said. “There are a lot of people working in the financial quarter that haven’t been to a block party yet, and we want to get them out of those towers and able to do that.”

He emphasized that studioMAIN is simply presenting a way for the city to develop suggestions for improvements. The goal of the Financial Quarter is to be able to play the business role during the day, but also to become a hangout spot for happy hour and into the evening.

“We want to get people out of the buildings and on to the streets,” Little Rock mayor Mark Stodola said.

Ideally, Woodruff said that people would be able to see changes in the fall, but realistically it will probably start to happen in spring 2016, beginning with the pop up events.

Individual property owners would handle the cost of the majority of the projects.

“We’re talking about the design of the city – not a project but the design of a street — and how people engage with a street and show how proper design can really make a difference,” Woodruff said.