Lafayette Square Resident Ashli Ahrens Launches Two Unique Collections

Ashli Ahrens caught the collecting bug when she and husband Kelley Bass moved into Lafayette Square five years ago. Intrigued by the building’s history, she began searching for any memorabilia from The Lafayette when it served as a working hotel. The easiest things to find were postcards, and Ahrens unearthed many featuring different views of the storied hotel.

Next she found beautiful postcards with vivid renderings of Main Street and nearby Cathedral of St. Andrew. Her collection expanded to include other historic downtown Little Rock and North Little Rock buildings and landmarks, and just like that, Ahrens says, “I had inadvertently turned into a postcard collector.”

A content developer for New Jersey-based ADP, LLC, Ahrens continued collecting postcards while also slowly adding to her Lafayette Hotel collection. Thanks to family and friends, and “the wonderful world of eBay,” her Lafayette collection now includes several postcards, matchbooks, silverware, glasses, ashtrays and much more.

Credit: Dean Wheeler

Of the postcards, Ahrens has two favorites (shown above in order of reference): the “butterfly woman” card, postmarked 1906, which has tiny pictures of important downtown buildings in her wings. “I love the design and I love that it has the double diamond postmark, which I’m told was only used in Arkansas in 1906 and is therefore rare,” she says. Her other favorite is the postcard showing a view of Lincoln Avenue from the perspective of the train tracks behind the train station. “Lincoln Avenue later became Cantrell Road. The card shows the gorgeous Victorian houses that lined the area of Cantrell then. The only home that remains from that time is the Packet House, which can be seen on that postcard.”

Mementos from a Little Rock Icon

Credit: Dean Wheeler

Ahrens’ most treasured Lafayette Hotel piece is a promotional flyer that she believes was printed when the hotel first opened in 1925 (see below). “That booklet was in someone’s album for decades, protected from the light, and is in amazing shape,” she says. “It shows many photos of the Lafayette’s public spaces and rooms as they were at the the time, in addition to very elaborate text extolling the virtues and features of the hotel. My mother, Claudia Ahrens, bought it from a local ephemera dealer a few years ago and surprised me with it. Tucked into the back cover is a slip of paper, handwritten, that says the brochure was up for an award, likely a printing award or an advertising award. I suppose the person who wrote that note also put it in the album that protected it all these years.”

Also in the collection:

1. Two glasses that Ahrens calls “bathroom glasses” show an outline of the hotel and the name in script.

2. Ahrens’ friend Amy Garland Angel found a Lafayette Hotel coffee cup at a local flea market and surprised her with it.

Credit: Dean Wheeler

3. A room-key fob appears to be leather, but upon closer inspection, is actually very hard, pressed paper.

4. A 1960s Arkansas Gazette photo taken from the Hall Building at Capitol Avenue and Main Street shows the street level of the Lafayette with 1960s-era cars parked on the street below.

Credit: Dean Wheeler

5. This set of engraved, silver-plated serving spoons by Reed and Barton were another gift from a friend. “These came to me, quite by surprise, from our friend Stacy Sells. Stacy has been a collector of ‘hotel silver’ for years but recently decided to thin down her collection. She was about to send many of her pieces to a dealer out of state when she learned I was collecting Lafayette items. She generously gave them to me, saying it was only right that they come back home,” Ahrens recalls.

6. A menu from a Standard Oil event held at the Lafayette. “The menu is so clever,” Ahrens says, “because they worked terminology from the oil business and the names of local executives into the description of the menu items.”

Credit: Dean Wheeler


Credit: Dean Wheeler

The Lafayette Hotel opened on Sept. 2, 1925, and featured 300 guest rooms, each with a private bath and circulating ice water, which rented for $2.50 and up per night. The 10-story Renaissance Revival building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

Part of a 1926 advertisement for the hotel read, “In Little Rock — It’s the Lafayette! Dine at the Lafayette! There’s music every evening in the Main Dining Room and you may dance as you dine at no extra charge.”

In addition to the restaurant and ballroom, George P. Elkins ran a barbershop in the basement, and the Lafayette Beauty Shop was located in the mezzanine. By 1930, there was a telegraph office in the hotel lobby.

The hotel closed in 1933 due to financial troubles and the building remained vacant until 1941 when it was purchased by Southwest Hotels Inc.

When the Lafayette reopened in 1941, Southwest Hotels had substantially remodeled the building, modernizing it and reducing the number of rooms to 260.

The hotel closed again in 1973, then re-opened in 1984 when a local banking firm purchased the building and did a $6.3 million rehab. During the renovations, the lobby ceiling was restored to the 1940s decor.

The Lafayette Building is now managed by Flake & Kelley Commercial and owned by Mr. and Mrs. C. Chadwick Gallagher, who purchased it in 2014.

— compiled by Alexis Hosticka

Do you have a unique collection? We’d love to hear about it! Email Amanda@LittleRockSoiree.com to share your story!

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