Clinton Presidential Center: Little Rock's Second Act
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
On the south bank of the Arkansas River in downtown Little Rock, a long glass-and-steel structure extends over a park like a bridge reaching into the sky. It is the William J. Clinton Presidential Center, and its opening in two thousand four transformed a derelict riverfront into one of the most visited destinations in the state.
The center was dedicated on November eighteenth, two thousand four, before a crowd of more than thirty thousand people who showed up despite a cold November downpour. Four sitting or former presidents attended. Bono and The Edge performed. The final cost was one hundred sixty-five million dollars.
The site itself had been an abandoned warehouse district and informal dump, the site of a former train station that had long since rotted away. The decision to build the presidential library here, rather than in Washington or in some wealthier part of Little Rock, anchored a revitalization of the city's riverfront that continued for years afterward. The surrounding River Market District grew up around the library's footprint.
The building is among the largest of all the presidential libraries, housing more than eighty million pages of documents, two million photographs, and eighty thousand artifacts from the Clinton administration. It was also the first presidential library to include electronic records alongside paper ones. A full-scale replica of the Oval Office as Clinton decorated it sits inside.
The center also houses the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, training graduate students in public policy and community engagement. The Rock Island Railroad Bridge beside it was converted into a pedestrian span.
Bill Clinton was born in Hope, Arkansas, and served as the state's governor before reaching the White House. The center here is an act of homecoming, and for Little Rock, it was an economic catalyst. Annual visitorship runs into the hundreds of thousands, and the library's presence helped remake the east end of downtown from neglect into a destination.
