The first episode has dropped.
Michael Schwarz, documentarian and all-around nice guy, was true to his word. After hanging out in Pine Bluff for more than a year, he went back home to Oklahoma to put together the first installment of five or more pieces about the city.
We do admire him because — wow! — there’s a lot to unpack there.
That would be true for any city, we imagine, but it is, as most people in the state know, more complicated for a Pine Bluff than say, doing a doc on a Conway. There, a city started small and through a variety of happenings and decisions, it grew. And there it is today. Job done.
For Pine Bluff, the start was modest, then it grew big, making it one of the largest cities in the state, and then the big fizzle started and has continued for decades.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
We had a caller years ago who said he wished the Pine Bluff Commercial was the one he used to read in the mid-80s. Newspapers are a reflection in many ways of the communities they serve, we told him, and then asked him what the city’s population was then and how many supermarkets there were in town and department stores on Main Street, etc. etc. The answers are obvious, as is the question about the condition at this moment of Pine Bluff. But “at this moment” doesn’t really tell the story adequately.
What Schwarz will provide, or we hope he will provide, will be answers to questions about how Pine Bluff got here. As he pointed out to reporter Eplunus Colvin this week, saying that the crime went up doesn’t get at the problem. What happened to make the crime go up? he asked. What circumstances occurred or intersected with other circumstances to create more lawlessness? Could the city’s reversals have been avoided by better leadership? Or was the collapse of certain industries, and we use that term broadly, going to lead to decay no matter what other elements were in play?
We recall Mayor Carolyn Robinson vowing in the late 1980s to have the husk of the Hotel Pines taken down. And there it stands today, a reminder on Main Street of Pine Bluff’s ability to look the other way so thoroughly that when it comes to urban blight, we cease to see it any longer. Will Schwarz dissect that aspect?
We doubt that a hot shot documentarian or historian or anyone else can totally get to the bottom of such far-reaching questions. We recall a former publisher who thought some of the city’s problems could be traced to the presence of smelly paper mills. While city leaders would recoil at such heresy and would say the stench in the air was “the smell of money,” the publisher would say that if the first thing people – investors, potential residents, business leaders, etc. – think when Pine Bluff is mentioned is that the air smells bad, many of those people are going to go elsewhere to live, open businesses and work.
That and other conundrums would appear to be unravelable. But projects like Schwarz’s are like archeological digs in that he may not reveal all there is to know about the Pine Bluff condition, but his work will shine more light on the problem than was there before.
Enough talk. It’s time to pop some popcorn and get to it. It’s on YouTube so it’s not like you need a subscription to watch.