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(Photograph by Dell Upton) -
(Photograph by Dell Upton) -
(Photograph by Dell Upton) -
(Photograph by Dell Upton) -
(Photograph by Dell Upton)
This former home of the Arkansas Gazette, a newspaper founded in 1819, was constructed for Austrian immigrant and businessman Peter Hotze. The three-story building of reinforced concrete is mainly faced in white glazed terracotta, although the two entrances to the building are of marble. The building’s upper two stories are boldly articulated by a sequence of bay windows separated by fluted Ionic columns. Terra-cotta swags ornament the spandrels, and the facade concludes strongly with a cornice carried on scrolled brackets. The Gazette ceased publication in 1991. In subsequent years, the building housed a mixture of retail and office space, and today a charter school occupies the structure. The school also occupies the former Federal Reserve Bank of 1924 opposite. Designed by Thompson and Harding, the limestone-clad building forms a pleasing contrast with the Gazette Building, matching it in height and classical elements, but signaling its own era and federal seriousness in the plainness of the columns, pilasters, and ornamentation. It, too, was renovated by WER Architects.