Little Rock’s River Market food hall is still open. The city has been promising to close it since last September.

LITTLE ROCK — The sign on the roof still lights up over President Clinton Avenue. The building under it is scheduled to be gutted, and nobody at the city will say when.

Ottenheimer Market Hall, the city-owned food hall at 400 President Clinton Ave., is headed for a roughly $25 million overhaul. Most people know the building simply as the River Market, because of the block letters mounted on its roofline. It opened in 1996 as the anchor of a downtown revitalization push. This year marks 30 years.

Little Rock directors took the biggest formal step yet in June. The board approved a resolution letting the city spend its own money on the project first and reimburse itself later with bond proceeds, up to a maximum of $20 million. The city’s share, which includes money from the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau, covers the bulk of the work.

The rest comes from the developer. St. Louis-based New + Found is set to contribute about $5 million toward tenant-specific improvements and startup costs, and will operate the building once it reopens.

New + Found was the only firm to respond to the city’s request for qualifications, a city spokesperson said in November. Directors authorized a memorandum of understanding with the company on Jan. 13.

The company’s best-known project is City Foundry, a former St. Louis industrial site it redeveloped into a retail and entertainment district built around a food hall. Company president Will Smith told Little Rock directors in January that the St. Louis hall draws roughly 2.2 million visitors a year, and said the intent in Little Rock is to build the tenant lineup out of local operators.

A closing date that keeps moving

Mayor Frank Scott Jr. announced in September 2025 that the hall would close that fall for construction. It did not.

Nearly a year later it is still serving customers. At the June agenda-setting meeting, Scott suggested operations would shut down sometime around fall or December of this year.

LRCVB President and CEO Gina Gemberling said the same day that there is no firm date. The project remains in the design phase, she told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and officials expect to know more as design work advances. She said she was not aware of a target date for finalizing the design.

That leaves the vendors who rent stalls inside the hall without a timeline. The building currently houses a run of food stands offering different cuisines, with a barbecue restaurant at the east end. Operations are overseen by the visitors bureau.

The hall has been through a shutdown before. When it closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the visitors bureau stopped charging rent and let vendors defer booth insurance. Eleven vendors came back when it reopened in May 2021. Four did not.

City officials have said they expect the hall to close during construction, but have not released a relocation plan for current tenants or said whether they will get first refusal on space in the rebuilt hall.

What is still unanswered

Three questions matter most. When does the hall actually close. Whether the current stall operators have a path back in. And what the long-term operating agreement gives a private company running a building financed with public bonds.

Talks about reworking Ottenheimer Market Hall have been going on since at least 2019.

This story will be updated.