A short history of Little Rock Guyana

Most companies begin with a plan. This one began with a question from a customer.

In the 1980s a hotel at Vryman’s Erven, New Amsterdam, was doing well enough on food and entertainment that its guests started asking for something the hotel did not have: television. That question — and the engineer who took it seriously — is the reason there is a Channel 10, a Rock FM, and a family of businesses at 10 Main and Church Streets today.

The engineer

Rockcliff Syomen Christie was born on 8 April 1931 in Vergenoegen, Essequibo, the second of eleven children. He left home for Georgetown at fourteen and apprenticed at the Sprostons dock and foundry, learning carpentry, joinery, welding and boatbuilding — and, as he liked to tell it, making crochet needles, knives, combs and curlers to sell at the market. He served five years there while finishing secondary school part-time.

At twenty he heard soldiers talking about walking the cattle trail to Brazil, packed his things and went. The trek took roughly two weeks on foot. He spent a year moving between Boa Vista, Bom Fim and Lethem, taking whatever work he could find.

In 1956 he sailed for England. He lodged at the Salvation Army headquarters, took a labouring job with British Railways, and used the shift pattern to study — an Ordinary National Certificate in Building, then a Higher National Certificate in Building Engineering, along with diplomas in architectural draughtsmanship, building design and civil engineering. He stayed ten years.

Home, in time for independence

He came back to Guyana in 1966, the year the country became independent, and was taken on as a District Engineer with the Ministry of Works and Hydraulics. He worked on the arches raised around Georgetown for the independence celebrations, and then spent ten years running the district from Mahaicony to Ithaca — roads, buildings, bridges, and the water supply.

If you drive through Guyana you pass his work without knowing it. The Black Bush Polder Road. The Mahaicony Branch Road. The Canje Bridge. The chalets at the old psychiatric hospital in Berbice. Stretches of the road between Rosignol and Georgetown.

He was an engineer first. Everything that came after was an engineering answer to a business problem.

The first Little Rock Hotel

Stationed in Berbice, he used the same skills to build for himself: the first Little Rock Hotel, at Vryman’s Erven, New Amsterdam. There he met and married Shabela Pearl Dindial. They ran the hotel together — food, rooms and entertainment — and it is Pearl’s name that still sits beside his in the family’s account of how the business was built.

Berbice’s first television station

The guests wanted television. The first answer was practical: stock video cassettes and lend them out. The permanent answer was to build a television station.

Little Rock Television Stations — LRTVS, Channel 10 — became the first television station in Berbice. It began transmitting on fifteen watts. Then sixty. Then one hundred. Then a thousand, which put a signal across the county. Channel 10 has been carrying news to Berbice since 1989, and today that newsroom runs as LRTVS NewsWatch, with reporters in the field and every report published online as well as broadcast.

The Suites, the radio station, the hall

In 2005 he designed and built Little Rock Suites at 10 Main and Church Streets — an executive, family-owned hotel and conference centre, and still the address at the centre of everything the family runs.

Radio took longer, and it took persistence. Applications went in during the early 1990s and again in 1997. The licence was granted in 2011.

On Saturday 29 March 2014 he launched 88.5 Rock FM: the first radio station transmitting from the county of Berbice. The launch was attended by the President, Donald Ramotar, and the station went on air with around sixty employees. Its slogan — “the lowest frequency in the country, the highest in our hearts” — is a joke about the dial position that turned into a promise about the audience. Later that year the business took the Heritage Business Award at Guyana’s inaugural African Business Awards.

On 29 April 2016 came the banquet hall and multi-purpose centre at 10 Main and Church Streets, across the road from the Suites — today the Eclipse Retro Lounge. Ten Street Sweets, the ice-cream, fast-food and creole shop that anchors the corner, followed as part of the same block.

What is there now

Rockcliff Christie died on 18 November 2020. The businesses he built are run today by his daughter, Naomi Eglantine Christie — an Attorney-at-Law admitted to the Guyana Bar in 2013, and the company’s CEO.

The Little Rock family now covers two stations (88.5 Rock FM and LRTVS Channel 10, with its NewsWatch newsroom), two places to stay (Little Rock Suites and Little Rock Hotel), a café, a lounge, a bistro, a clothing label, a children’s brand and a publishing shelf. They sit within a few minutes’ walk of each other in New Amsterdam.

Why the history matters to a visitor

It explains the shape of the place. A hotel that had to solve its own entertainment problem ends up owning a television station. A television station that wants to reach further ends up on FM. A hotel that hosts events ends up building a hall across the road. Nothing here was bought in; it was built, in order, by people who still live on the same street.

That is also why a booking, an advertisement and a news report all come through the same few phone numbers. It is one family business wearing several hats — and it started because somebody asked to watch television.