LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- If I had been asked to name three places in the United States I would never have thought to visit for a vacation, Little Rock, Ark., Walla Walla, Wash., and the entire state of Texas would have led the candidates.
There is still no compelling reason for me to return to Texas. If I want to see bands from Austin's South by Southwest Festival, I can wait until they tour. I may yet avoid Walla Walla, even though friends just moved there pursuing careers in the wine industry.
But business brought me back to Little Rock recently, and I found a city transformed in anticipation of the opening of Bill Clinton's presidential library, an ambitious $165 million project that has spurred an $800 million building boom in this long-neglected Sun Belt city.
Civic leaders expect the Clinton Presidential Center to draw about 300,000 visitors next year, and they are banking that it will continue to lure tour groups and conventions to a city that has been overlooked routinely by the hordes who travel every year to Memphis, a two-hour drive away.
''One of our challenges in Little Rock has always been getting people to come here the first time," said Skip Rutherford, president of the Clinton Foundation. ''Once they get here, they always want to come back."
Clinton's decision to build his library in the capital of his home state already has had a dramatic effect on the city's River Market area, which locals recall was recently an abandoned warehouse district full of pigeons and winos.
A few bars and restaurants were taking root already, but since 1997, when Clinton announced plans to put the library on a 30-acre parcel where a bend in the Arkansas River meets Interstate 30, the area has turned into a vibrant strip of nightspots and boutiques.
Recently, the city has seen the construction of the first big office buildings in nearly 15 years. The high-tech company
''For a city of our size, that's incredible," said Lucas Hargraves of the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau. (The city's population is 185,000, the metropolitan area's 580,000.) Nearly 2,000 hotel rooms have been built or renovated recently. ''Much of that is in anticipation of the Clinton library and what that's going to mean in tourism and conventions in our city," Hargraves said.
Grand hotels like the old Capital, which serves high tea in a stately lobby, and the newly renovated Peabody, where the ''duck master" guides mallards down a red carpet into the lobby fountain every morning, are within walking distance of the library.
Nearby restaurants include the legendary Doe's, a down-home family-style dining hall where the smallest steak on the menu is a two-pound T-bone, and the Flying Saucer, where the food is secondary to the more than 200 beers on the menu. (All the decorative tableware glued to the walls and ceiling might well appear to fly if you made your way through even half of the taps.)
Other Little Rock attractions include the Old State House, which now functions as a historical museum, and Central High School, where in 1957 President Eisenhower sent troops to forcibly integrate classes.
Clinton said he wanted his library to be ''architecturally significant," and wrote in his autobiography, ''My Life," that he wanted the exhibit space to be ''open, beautiful, and full of light, and I wanted the material presented in a way that demonstrated America's movement into the 21st century."
He turned to the Polshek Partnership, the New York architectural firm that designed the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, which presents itself to passersby as a glass cube housing a massive globe.
Set in a public park, the Clinton library is a long glass box that, seen from an angle, appears to jut out over the river. One reviewer pronounced the clean-edged structure ''bold and dramatic" and ''a simple geometric abstraction [that is] laden with symbolism." Another suggested it resembled a double-wide in the sky.
To protect the historical materials inside, the glass that wraps around the building was engineered to eliminate ultraviolet light and reduce solar heat.
In addition to the museum and archives, the building houses Clinton himself. The former president plans to live one week a month in a 2,000-square-foot modernist-style penthouse perched on top of the building. But he wants the center to be more than his second home or a tourist attraction.
''This library is the symbol of a bridge, a bridge to the 21st century," Clinton said at the inauguration ceremony. ''What it is to me is the symbol of not only what I tried to do, but what I want to do with the rest of my life: building bridges from yesterday to tomorrow, building bridges across racial and religious and ethnic and income and political divides."
The museum is packed with interactive exhibits designed to help people understand what a day in the White House was like. In a mock Cabinet Room, visitors can sit in a secretary's chair and learn about that particular department's responsibilities by tapping on computer screens embedded in the table. Video and text displays lay out policy predicaments and offer comments from key players -- from policy advisers to Clinton himself -- explaining how big decisions were made.
''The public, we believe, has a real hunger to find out about how the president governs," said Ralph Appelbaum, who also designed exhibits for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, ''how he takes aspirations and makes it into policy, and the mechanism for turning that policy into legislation."
An exact replica of the Oval Office includes artwork Clinton had hanging when he was in office and even the knickknacks he kept on his desk. The room takes advantage of the natural light flooding the facility, setting it apart from the dimly lighted replicas in other libraries.
In addition to 80 million pages of presidential documents, the library holds 80,000 artifacts and more than 23 million electronic documents. Rutherford said freshening the exhibits will not be a problem.
''We have enough not to repeat ourselves for 30 years," he said.
Other materials on display are more about the man and his family than about his presidency: a collection of political buttons and another of saxophones, a table set for a state dinner, the sunglasses Clinton wore on ''The Arsenio Hall Show." Children also can play some of Chelsea Clinton's favorite games.
A 120-foot timeline attempts to lay out the complex narrative of the Clinton years and the factors beyond Washington that helped shape them, from the squabble over gays in the military to the battle for deficit reduction, from the health insurance proposal debacle to the war in Kosovo.
The timeline -- complete with copies of the president's schedule for each day he was in office -- runs down the middle of the main room. Interactive stations on the back of the panel let visitors dig into what was happening on a specific day or explore programs such as welfare and education.
''The idea is to give it depth and layer, and to really refer to the way he was," Appelbaum said.
Thematic niches run along the walls facing each side of the timeline: ''Building One America" addresses the gap between the haves and have-nots in in the country; ''Learning Across a Lifetime" is about education policies Clinton pursued; ''Making Communities Safer" talks about providing the money to put 100,000 new police officers on the street. Monica Lewinsky and the impeachment campaign are dealt with in an alcove titled ''The Fight for Power."
The center offers a rare combination of fun and civics. Little Rock will never be San Francisco or New York, but it could be a place to take my children to show them a little bit of the South, and a little bit of what the end of the 20th century was like.
Kevin Galvin can be reached at kgalvin@globe.com.
