Location

The Mitchell Blackstock law firm is located in the historic Solomon Gans House. The Gans House is on the National Register of Historic Places. Commissioned in 1896 by Solomon Gans, it is one of the few survivors of a fashionable 19th century Little Rock neighborhood. According to local lore, Gans House was designed by Max Orlopp and Kasper Kusener, architects, who designed the 1887 section of the Pulaski County Courthouse, the 1891 Masonic Temple and the Hornibrook House in Little Rock.

The Gans House was unique both in style and building materials. It was constructed of gray granite, quarried at Granite Mountain in south Little Rock by the Twentieth Century Granite Company, which featured the house in its advertisements. The house was built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style with round wide arches and heavy rock masonry. Houses in the fashionable Victorian neighborhood were usually built of brick or frame in the Italianate and Queen Anne style.

Beautiful stained glass windows, parquet floors, pocket doors, and the stairwell are all originals, as are the green, glazed brick fireplace and the tiled fireplace. The top floor served as a ballroom, as was common in Victorian houses.

1912 Addition

The purchase of an automobile prompted Solomon Gans to hire architect Charles Thompson to design a garage, colonnade, and second story sleeping porch in 1912. The original plans for this porch are stored at the Old State House. Also constructed of gray granite, the garage, known as the Gans Carriage House, still stands behind the Gans House.

The garage was built for one car which entered at the east off Chester Street by driving through the colonnade consisting of ten columns, weighing around two thousand pounds each. The garage itself had ornate glass double doors, an underground gas tank, and a wash bay drain. The servants quarters were probably above the garage.

The sleeping porch was likely demolished in the 1940’s when the building was converted for office use. The columns were donated to the City of Little Rock in 1984 and now serve as the foundation for the gazebo in MacArthur Park.

1992 Restoration

Mitchell, Blackstock, Ivers & Sneddon, PLLC, bought the Gans House in 1996 from attorney Charles Hicks. Mr. Hicks had restored the property in 1992.

The restoration included removing, cleaning and tightening of the stained glass throughout the house. Large metal awnings were removed from the stained glass windows to showcase them. During the restoration process workers discovered the diamond-patterned parquet floor of oak, walnut and cherry hidden under tile in the entranceway, and pocket doors, which rolled out without hesitation after being hidden behind the walls for forty to fifty years. A carpenter was hired to recreate missing pieces of flooring and to carve duplicate spindles to replace some of the damaged hand carved spindles on the stairway.

The basement revealed a large vault with four-foot thick walls, likely installed by one of the insurance companies that owned the building after 1946. Central air was piped through the vault wall leaving the vault still working but no longer airtight.

Mr. Hicks rebuilt the northeast corner addition as offices with windows on all three sides with a side porch based on Charles Thompson’s 1912 plans. Finally, an apartment with a sunken bedroom was added to the fourth floor.

Solomon Gans

Solomon Gans was born in July 1858 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Jacob and Bluma Gans. Jacob, a native of Prussia, moved the family to Georgia when Solomon was a child. Jacob Gans served as a confederate soldier during the Civil War. After losing all of his property in the war Jacob moved his family to Little Rock and with his brother Gus opened a retail dry goods store at 108 Main Street. The Gans family was among Little Rock's earliest Jewish residents and Jacob a pioneer member of Congregation B’nai Israel.

The Gans brothers’ business was located at Capitol and Main Street on the first floor of the Masonic Temple, which was destroyed in a 1919 fire. In 1894 Gus Gans built a home at 920 West Third Street. Today a Firestone Store stands at the site. Gus and Solomon built another building in 1903, located at 217 West Second Street, which was restored in the early 1980's.

Solomon became an affluent businessman and owner of considerable real estate. Jacob Gans died in 1900 and Solomon assumed overall management of the business until his own retirement in 1922. Two years later, in 1924, Solomon Gans moved to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he died in 1926.