The public will soon be able to tour the inside of former President Bill Clinton's boyhood home on Park Avenue for the first time following its recent purchase by a local Realtor.
Chris Rix, a Realtor who is currently restoring and revitalizing several historic properties around town, bought the house at 1011 Park Ave. around a month ago. He said he has been looking at buying and saving the property for around a year.
"Driving by this house every day and seeing it just sit here, die a little bit more every day and see people down street-level, stopping to take a quick picture, worried they were going to get arrested or something was really bizarre to me," Rix said.
Video not playing? Click here https://www.youtube.com/embed/18b0AfQ4ILc
Once the home of a future president, Rix said it has more recently been occupied by homeless people and had begun to deteriorate.
"To live through the Clinton administration, I'm glad to be able to grab this house, and do a proper hat nod to the Clintons," Rix said.
"We have tourists that come every day for this and I'm glad to be able to get it opened, stabilized and not a derelict property, and give it the respect it deserves," he said. "I think it's been vacant for maybe even up to three years."
Rix said water damage and mold have occurred over the years so he will likely not try to restore the building to its original appearance.
Standing on the second floor of the house, Rix pointed to some of the wallpaper and noted he didn't know if it and the wallboard dates to when the Clintons lived there, but due to the water damage, it would have to go.
"This era, and possibly the paper, may have been when Clinton was here, I don't know that," Rix said, "But nonetheless, since there's been so much water intrusion ... you get into mold issues, so what I'm going to do is delete any health hazards."
He said the "porous material that could potentially have mold or anything, that will just go away."
As for Rix's plans for the building, he said he wants to open it up for tourism, but it will be different from the President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site in Hope.
The Hope site is a "very specific, come tour the house, and it's great, but I feel like in the community betterment avenue that I'm trying to do, while, yes, this is the boyhood home, maybe it's appropriate to stage one room," Rix said.
"This is a very large space, there could be different activities, different group meetings," he said, such as Alcoholics Anonymous.
"I want to use this space as a true community space to really boost the community," he said.
Rix said he is hopeful he will be able to work with the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, noting, "To me, that's kind of just a no-brainer to get some of the memorabilia."
The building will take a few months to get ready to be opened, he said, since this is not a restoration, but a stabilization.
"So the property will be stabilized, new roof, new HVAC, all electrical updated. Everything that will keep this property alive. It's over 100 years old, so ... when I get done with it, there's zero reason this property won't live another at least 70-80 years on my watch," Rix said. "I have every intention to open it to tourists so they can actually tour the home."
In addition to out-of-town tourists, he said he is looking forward to opening the building up to field trips.
"It should 100% be a field trip opportunity. Children can come to the door, they can have a bag lunch here on the property," he said.
While the property still has a few signs out front warning people to not trespass, Rix has started removing them, and hopes to make it more approachable.
"For many, many years, it's just had all of these signs, like multiple signs. There's still a ton of signs down there ... there were so many signs across the front, you didn't even want to drive by and look at it, it was that scary," he said.
"Just to simply make the property friendly again, and then being able to properly flip it into tourism, I think it's really exciting to be the person to make that happen," Rix said, noting the effort will take a team to help him.
Rix said he would love to be able to give Bill and Hillary Clinton a tour of the house.
"I would be so happy to have the Clintons here," he said.
The stabilization "won't take six months. Once I get started, I'd say two to three months," he said. "This could easily be ready by, let's just say mid-July to August."
