When someone says “the bottom of Cantrell Hill,” every Little Rock resident knows exactly what it means. It means the tight-knit community of restaurants, shops and offices, many of which have been planted in their exact spots for a generation or more.
Some landmarks, like Shakey’s Pizza Parlor and Cordell’s Deli, have slowly and sadly gone the way of the buffalo. Others, like Buffalo Grill, have stood the test of Little Rock time.
Then there’s Cynthia East. Her store, Cynthia East Fabrics, has remained at 1523 Rebsamen Park Road for three decades, celebrating 38 years of business in September. Although some are oddly surprised to hear that Cynthia East is a real person, she’s no stranger to the region. Memories of the bottom of Cantrell Hill area, known as Riverdale, reach back much further than that for East.
“Oh, I remember coming down here all the time,” she says. “The big treat in the summertime was, after you’d eaten dinner and caught all the lightning bugs, one of the parents on the block would pile all the neighborhood kids in a station wagon and go to the dairy cream. We’d sit out here forever eating ice cream cones. I have very fond memories of the friendliness and comfort of this area.”
But just as East recalls these sweet and hazy summer visions, her store — filled with designer fabrics, gifts and a staff of women she never stops bragging about — is home to a steady stream of customers everyone greets by name, then asks about their parents, grandparents and children.
The walls are lined with bolts of prints and patterns, neutral grays and aqua swimming pool hues, spots and stripes and silks and linens. The staff knows them by name, too. Nothing seems like a warehouse, despite the sheer number of fabrics, draperies and pillows. Walking in, you get the feeling that you’ve stumbled upon a family reunion, one you’re more than welcome to join, to come and sit a spell, and East is smiling ear to ear at the head of the table.
She always loved fabric. Her mother taught her how to sew with the precision of an expert seamstress, how to hand tie knots in thread, press seams as she went, insert perfectly placed pins.
But East boils it down to a much more meaningful core: “She taught me not to cut corners.”
Nearly four decades ago, East stopped cutting corners. She was a creative coordinator and grammarian at what was then Cranford Johnson Hunt, keeping print and broadcast material matched and on track. She loved her job and was good at it.
“It really was sort of that ‘Mad Men’ vibe, right in the middle of all the Cranford Johnson glory. It was so much fun.”
When the agency moved into the 22nd floor of the First National Bank Building downtown, Wayne Cranford asked East, whose love of fabric and decorating was no secret, to help with the redesign. She went to town on the space, making friends along the way with the owner of the region’s go-to store for fabric, Bluff City Broom Corn in Memphis. One day, East made an off-the-cuff comment about how they should open a Little Rock location, and the owner called her on it.
“I was so young,” East says. “I was scared. I’d been comfortable working at Cranford. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but part of me just felt like this was the right direction.”
Despite any former glory the area once claimed, Riverdale had fallen on hard times after the rerouting of Cantrell Road. Businesses that depended on drive-by and walking traffic suffered, and so soon did the neighborhood’s vibrancy.
This didn’t stop East from setting up shop in the district. She and her husband, Bob East of East-Harding Construction, set to work on a building that had been vacant for a year. During that time, the pipes had burst and the sheetrock had started crumbling. It was full of debris and smelled terrible, but the rent was dirt-cheap and she had big dreams.
That was in 1977. Now, Cynthia East Fabrics is a landmark in its own right, helping bring the community back to life and even acting as a catalyst in the movement to become the “design district” of Little Rock in the 1990s. Home goods retailers, professional decorators and the like now dot the Riverdale map, non concerned about the lack of high traffic that once killed off local businesses.
“It was always a good part of town, but especially for our product, because it’s not an impulse purchase,” East says. “You want to cover your sofa? You need new draperies? You’re going to go where you can get what you need. It’s a pre-meditated purchase; it’s destination shopping.”
The symbiotic relationship between design district shops is the key to their own success. The healthier East’s store is, the healthier all the stores are. It pulls the customer in for the one-stop shopping that spreads business around. Even places like The Fold, Cajun’s Wharf and Brave New Restaurant changed more than just the skyline, adding to the area’s rediscovered youthfulness.
The neighborhood isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Customers aren’t interested in buying 60 yards of fabric to recover everything in the living and dining rooms; they want individual pieces like draperies, lamps and throw pillows. The entire nature of purchasing fabric has transformed, and East has made the transition each time, offering more of what the people want, including do-it-yourself classes and even headboard construction.
Through each nationwide economic hiccup or downfall, Cynthia East Fabrics has not only weathered the hard times, but has come out on top. It would have been easy to become a store thought of fondly, but hardly used, a novelty on the high shelf you keep around for sentimental reasons. That is hardly the case here.
East credits all the store’s strength and staying power to the hard work of her cherished staff and their devotion to remaining flexible, which do deserve much commendation.
But at the head of the table sits Cynthia East: the woman who spent two weeks at base camp while her husband summited Mt. Everest, but found her own mountaintop experience with the fabrics of nearby Kathmandu.
With intensity and purpose, East loves the people with whom she surrounds herself and the passion with which she fills her life. Fabric is still as exciting to her now as it was when her mother taught her all its secrets. Equally thrilling is the community at the bottom of Cantrell Hill, which holds East’s past, her present and her future.
“Yes, we’ve thought about opening another shop out west, this is important. It is important to stay here and make this the best that we can, and we love it. I’m so proud of owning this space,” East says with a grin.
“We’re here to stay.”