Little Rock, Ark.- What would you expect from the president who played sax on “Arsenio” and indulged the underwear obsession of the MTV generation but a library every bit as eager to be liked as the man who inspired it?
On Thursday, nearly four years after leaving office, Bill Clinton will host President Bush and a cadre of former presidents as he dedicates the $165 million William J. Clinton Presidential Center on 30 riverside acres in downtown Little Rock.
The glass-and-steel building’s horizontal orientation and rail-bridge trusses – meant to evoke Clinton’s ubiquitous “bridge to the 21st century” metaphor – modernize Arkansas’ architecture by light-years.
But the center also represents a novel concept in presidential libraries: one that’s actually accessible.
Richard Olcott, lead architect of the library along with his associate, James Polshek, of New York’s Polshek Partnership firm, remembers the travel frustrations of scouting the country’s 11 other presidential libraries, which range from Reagan’s ranchlike complex in Simi Valley, Calif., to the funky pod scheme I.M. Pei devised for the Kennedy library in Boston.
“In Atlanta, we got into a cab at the airport and told the driver to take us to the Carter Library,” Olcott said. “The response was: ‘Where is it?’ Nobody’s ever going to say that here.”
And that’s not just because library officials plan special tours for hospitality workers in the area – a series of behind-
the-scenes peeks for the cocktail waitresses and hotel doormen who likely will field just as many Clinton library questions as professional tour guides.
The site Clinton selected for his library takes advantage both of the rolling Arkansas River and the park’s stone’s-
throw proximity from the city’s most magnetic district, River Market, a strip of restaurants, museums, galleries and loft apartments.
Also, the kinetic thrust of the building’s design is echoed in a stretch of interstate zooming nearby and forming the unofficial western boundary of the park. At 41 million vehicles per year, I-30 is Arkansas’ most-
traveled corridor.
“The library is highly visible,” said Lucas Hargraves, of the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau. “This was the first presidential library built with the tourist at the top of the list.”
Indeed, it’s as if Clinton took a look at the exorbitant cab fares and stiff-lipped museum exhibits imposed upon other presidential library visitors and said: “I feel your pain.”
Oh, sure, there are the traditional presidential-library touches. The climate-controlled archives building, tethered to the 20,000-square-foot museum by a limestone tunnel, provides by-appointment access to 80 million pieces of presidential paperwork – the most voluminous yield of any president. (“The mythology that e-mail would save paper is just that,” Olcott said.) Are any of them Post-its, you ask? “Tons of them,” said David Alsobrook, the center’s archivist. “That’s a modern archival problem for us that we didn’t have back in the Carter administration. And we don’t know what happens with Post-its as they age because they haven’t been with us for very long.”
An oak-paneled conference area in the adjacent remodeled 1899 train depot now housing the Clinton School of Public Service was designed after the reading room of the New York Public Library, complete with deep window seats and a working fireplace. (The school, connected with the University of Arkansas, will offer a master’s degree in public service.)
And the exhibits installed by Holocaust Museum designer Ralph Appelbaum make use of a colonnade of cherry shelving enveloping an interactive timeline of Clinton’s administrations (where the visitor will find the library’s promised acknowledgment of the Monica Lewinsky and impeachment stumbles).
The shelves – holding binders of manifests and presidential documents – literally bookend display cases showing off gifts from heads of state and the museum’s vast collection of saxophones, many of them given to Clinton.
But library officials in this city of 184,000 know that the 300,000 visitors they expect to attract each year – a number cushioned by conventions, such as the League of United Latin American Citizens, who chose Little Rock over Chicago and San Diego because of the library – will be drawn as much by spectacle as by scholarship.
“We’re very conscious that people are like moths, and this is a lighted-up place,” said Polshek. “Every project derives from the mission of the institution or the personality of the client, and Clinton was the ultimate populist president.”
To that end, library officials are negotiating with their counterparts at that other shrine to a swaggering Southern icon with a large appetite – Elvis Presley’s Graceland in Memphis, Tenn. They hope to offer a two-for-
one deal in which tourists can take in one museum, then hop a bus for the 2 1/2-hour ride to either Memphis or to Little Rock and visit the other.
But there’s plenty to keep the Little Rock-bound breathless. How about jogging in Bill’s footsteps? For the next several weeks, the tourism board will stock downtown hotel rooms, such as the Little Rock Peabody (formerly the Excelsior Hotel, site of the infamous Paula Jones encounter) with maps detailing Clinton’s old jogging route, beginning from the steps of the Governor’s Mansion (currently home to Republican Mike Huckabee) and including a stop for coffee at the downtown McDonald’s.
In the spirit of the now famous Toni Morrison-ism (which could be updated to laud Clinton as the country’s first black former president), the first of the museum’s rotating exhibits will be a celebration of the blues music of the Delta.
After Thanksgiving weekend, when the center’s $7 admission goes into effect, the only section visitors can access for free will be Cafe 42, the ground-floor restaurant celebrating Clinton’s place in the presidential chronology and aspiring to be a hot new lunch spot among the area’s technology workers and loft-dwellers.
And the library’s crowning touch – figuratively if not literally – is the precise replica of the Oval Office as decorated by Kaki Hockersmith, Clinton’s go-to interior designer. (Figurative, because the building’s actual crown is a glass-box apartment where Clinton is expected to spend many a weekend in Little Rock. At press time, Hockersmith was still scratching her head over how to get the grand piano up there: The freight elevator stops at the fourth floor.)
The duplication is so successful that Skip Rutherford, president of the fundraising William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation, expects to fend off requests from Hollywood filmmakers angling to shoot presidential scenes there.
Visitors dizzied by the center’s bells and whistles can cool their heels under the 120-magnolia canopy of the Contemplation Grove, for which the park’s landscapers relieved a tree farm in Athens, Ga., of its entire crop of the Southern staple. The magnolias join an arboretum of trees common to Arkansas, including maples, black gum and river birch. The plantings cut linear swaths across a field of zoysia, much of which will have to be resodded after the foot traffic and heavy machinery of Thursday’s dedication, for which a miniature and temporary “stadium” has been constructed on the grounds to provide seating for the 27,000 ticket-holders for the outdoor event.
“There is something called the ‘wow factor,’ where people who will visit will have really not experienced a building like this at all,” said Polshek, who previously wowed New Yorkers with his splashy spherical design for the Rose Center for Earth and Space planetarium at the American Museum of National History.
And, as the repository of the Clinton legacy prepares to set sail, Polshek proved the center really does include something for everybody – metaphors included.
“The design is about time, and it’s about space, which all architecture is,” he said. “But in a deterministic way, we were thinking about moving people up and in a comfortable way, making it clear where they were going, how they get out, where do they go to the bathroom, where do they sit down and rest. In that way, it’s really a little bit like being on a boat, as well as a bridge.”
Kyle Brazzel is a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock.
If you go
Getting there: Little Rock is about 800 miles from Denver. Frontier Airlines has nonstop flights twice a day between Denver and Little Rock.
William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park: 1200 President Clinton Ave., Little Rock, Ark. 72201; 501-370-5050; |
From airport: Take Interstate 30 to Exits 140-A or 140-B.
Hours: Monday-Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday, 1-5 p.m. Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day
Admission: Adults, $7; seniors 62 and older, college students and retired military, $5; children 6-17, $3; children under 6, active military and school groups, no charge. Note: Admission charge will be waived through Thanksgiving weekend.
There is no admission charge to visit only Cafe 42, serving lunch and snacks.
Hotels: (Within walking distance and with stops on the River Rail trolley route: Peabody Little Rock, 3 Statehouse Plaza, 800-732-2639; Capital Hotel, West Markham and Louisiana streets, 800-766-7666; Courtyard by Marriott, 521 President Clinton Avenue, 800-321-2211.
