The history of Little Rock’s West 9th Street

During Reconstruction starting in the late 1830s, newly freed Black men and women gathered from across Arkansas to Little Rock. The capital city had a reputation as one of the more progressive towns in the South - less financially tied to the plantation economy than rural areas, and more tolerant of the community now building itself from the ground up.

A place called Blissville

The area around present-day West 9th Street started as a federal encampment where emancipated slaves arrived by the thousands. What began as tents and shanties grew quickly into a brick-and-mortar business district. By the late 19th century, Little Rock was considered a "salt and pepper city" - demographics more geographically interwoven than they are even today. At the turn of the 20th century, Arkansas had more Black legislators than at any other point in history.

A Walk Down The Line

As the 20th century progressed, West 9th Street became the heart of Little Rock's African American business district. The street earned the nickname "The Line" - the boundary between Black and White parts of the city, but also the center of everything that mattered in the Black community.

Businesses varied greatly but the street had it all. Barber shops, beauty salons, restaurants, pharmacies, law offices, doctors, dentists, juke joints and clubs. Almost every block had its own pharmacy. The Arkansas Gazette called the community "the prosperous race" for their entrepreneurship and overall success.

Taborian Hall was the most expensive building constructed in Little Rock in 1918 - built and funded entirely by the Black community.

The Fraternity of Community

Much of what made The Line thrive was the network of fraternal organizations that acted as mutual aid societies. These groups funded medical care, life insurance, and community organizing - keeping Black communities from buckling under the systemic disadvantages of the era. One such organization, the Knights and Daughters of Tabor, built the Taborian Hall that still stands at 800 W. 9th Street.

The Great Depression strained these organizations hard. The Tabors lost their building. But West 9th Street didn't go quiet - it adapted. As the fraternal headquarters faded, the center of gravity on The Line shifted to its entertainment district. And at the heart of that was the Dreamland Ballroom.

The Golden Era

The 1940s and 50s were the peak of West 9th Street. World War II brought thousands of Black servicemen training at Camp Robinson across the river to Little Rock - and The Line was the only place they could go. The USO opened inside Taborian Hall in 1942. Money flowed. The street buzzed every night.

And the music. The Dreamland Ballroom on the third floor of Taborian Hall became one of the most celebrated venues in the South. It was the only consistently safe stop on the Chitlin Circuit in all of Arkansas, which meant that virtually every major Black artist touring the region came through Little Rock - and played Dreamland.

Duke Ellington. Ella Fitzgerald. Louis Armstrong. Count Basie. Cab Calloway. B.B. King played here three times in the 1950s alone. Etta James, Dizzy Gillespie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe - the list reads like a who's who of American music history.

"People would come from miles around just to see what it was like.”
”This was the mecca of entertainment in the South.”
”We thought we were on top of the world."
— Quotes from Dream Land Documentary

Then came the construction of Interstate 630. The project dragged on for years, driving a concrete wedge between West 9th Street and the Dunbar neighborhood behind it. By the time it was complete in the early 1980s, the corridor it cut through was largely gone. The buildings came down. The lights went out on The Line.

What STands

Two buildings anchored the ends of West 9th Street and refused to disappear - the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center (built in 1913 but was rebuilt after it burned to the ground in 2005) to the east and Taborian Hall to the west. In 1982, Taborian Hall was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Nine years later, Kerry McCoy bought the abandoned building for her business, Arkansas Flag and Banner.

She had no idea what she was walking into. As the old-timers started stopping by to see who had restored the building, they brought their stories with them - and Kerry realized she had been entrusted with something far bigger than a building.

The Line Today

West 9th Street is finding its footing again. The Dreamland Ballroom on the third floor of Taborian Hall is fully restored and open to the public for the first time since 1968. On the first floor, where Gem Pharmacy once served the community for nearly four decades, the Dreamland Lounge carries on the tradition of gathering on The Line.

In the spring of 2026, the Beyond the Divide project brought over twenty local businesses, artists, and organizations to West 9th Street for a month-long demonstration of what the corridor could become again. The project culminated in the Juneteenth celebration on June 20, 2026 - a day that felt, to many who were there, like a beginning.

The anchors are still here. The story isn't finished.

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