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Union Station (Photograph by Dell Upton)
The former hotel designed by a prestigious Little Rock architect and built just south of the train tracks and near Union Station was intended to bring more business to this section of Main Street. Six stories in height, the U-shaped building has a two-story section across the open end of the U with a projecting portico on four sets of stocky paired columns. The capitals are composed of stone tablets hung with garlands, and a dentiled and bracketed box cornice gives the building a firm finish. The Main Street ends of the hotel wings have storefronts at ground level. Inside, the lobby is barrel vaulted and has gray marble columns and pilasters and a multicolored stained glass skylight. Paul M. Heerwagen of Fayetteville decorated the interior. The Pines was the finest hotel in Pine Bluff, but the postwar growth of hotel and motel accommodation along major highways, the abandonment of downtown from the 1960s, and the end of passenger rail in 1968 forced the hotel’s closure in 1970. It waits a new use. The former railroad station (1906) that once brought visitors and business people to Pine Bluff and the hotel is at E. 4th Avenue. It is a long, red brick single-story building and now accommodates the Jefferson County Museum.