When cotton was king...

Downtown Pine Bluff, Arkansas, population 55,000, has suffered a long running disembowelment resulting from natural causes, economic vagaries, industrial pillaging and misguided city management. Once a thriving agricultural center anchored by the cotton industry, it received a mortal blow in 1927 when the Arkansas River burst its banks and put most of Jefferson county underwater. Ironically, a drought in 1930 resulted in complete crop failures and was then followed by the depression years that stymied most recovery efforts. It wasn't until 1941, when the US Army bought a large tract of land north of town and built an arsenal, that economic diversity finally began to take hold. In the 1950s, two paper companies each built plants close to town, providing further diversity and absorbing more of the unemployed.
In the sixties, Pine Bluff, like so many other medium sized cities across the US, began participating in its own downtown demise by opening a shopping center on the south side, followed, fifteen years later, by an enclosed mall on the east side. Finally, to choke the last breath of life out of the once thriving downtown, a Wal-Mart Super-Center opened in 2004 on what had previously been farmland just south of town. The results of all of this progress are horribly clear. A quarter of the downtown area has been razed, leaving unsightly vacant blocks partly covered in grass and weeds. Half of the remaining buildings are empty, many others for sale and yet others cordoned off with plastic tape because chunks are crumbling off and falling to the street. As elsewhere, no solution to this sorry state of affairs is in sight and it remains to be seen what the end point of such deterioration will be.
On the Pine Bluff website, much is made of the Rail Road Museum and the country's only Band Museum. Unfortunately, the Band Museum appears to be history and the Rail Road Museum may not be too far behind. Finally, in what has come to be one of our hallmarks of poverty stricken southern towns, Pine Bluff has got murals!

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