Colored lights pulse in time with the haunting slow swing of a Billie Holiday tune, their hues reflecting off a chorus line of intricately carved marionettes. The silver-haired bartender — at his post beneath a movie marquee — is as likely to ask for your zodiac sign as your drink order. Just beyond this otherworldly watering hole known as the Malco Lounge, a magic show is underway.
No, this isn’t a "Twin Peaks" outtake. It’s Friday night in the heart of downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas.
In this city of about 39,000, the salubrious, 143-degree water that’s drawn mobsters, ballplayers and movie stars to its sultry pools gets all the credit. But just beyond the facades of the grand bathing palaces that line its famed Bathhouse Row, “Spa City” gets delightfully weird, offering up oddities and layers of history with gusto.
Visitors to Hot Springs, a road trip-able 370 miles north of Baton Rouge, will find a social calendar packed with mad cap events, a main drag that oozes boardwalk kitsch and local businesses embracing this one-time resort town’s vintage quirk.
A recent tourism boom has brought new dining and entertainment options, as well as the revival of retro accommodations, including motor inns like the pink neon-signed Dame Fortune Cottage Court run by Andie Roberts.
“There’s been a lot of attention to preservation lately,” Roberts said. “You have a lot of artists, a lot of creativity. It has that funkiness of some bigger cities, like Austin or Portland, but in a small town.”
Central Avenue winds through downtown Hot Springs, dividing Bathhouse Row (left) and the national park behind it from the historic city center (left).
Singular spa days
A version of the dual-towered Arlington Hotel has overlooked downtown since 1875.
Start the way Hot Springs itself started — with a soak like no other.
About a dozen women wrapped in white sheets wait in a small locker room. One by one, they’re lead back into the vaporous, industrial caverns of the Buckstaff Bathhouse. Here, there are no aromatherapy candles, no ambient pan flute. Just the sounds of water dripping onto marble.
Buckstaff, which has continuously operated since 1912, offers some of the same historic “water cures” that health-seekers flocked to Hot Springs for in the country’s pre-penicillin days.
Over the next two hours, these linen-clad ladies will be soaked in private whirlpools, steamed in metal cabinets, needled by high-pressure showers and packed with piping hot towels.
Buckstaff’s seven sister buildings along Bathhouse Row, all constructed over their own geothermal fonts, now house everything from a boutique hotel with spring-fed, in-room tubs (Hotelhale.com) to the first craft brewery to open in a national park (Superiorbathhouse.com). There’s even a modern spa (Quapawbaths.com). Just two unadulterated springs remain open to the public. See them au naturel behind the Maurice Bathhouse and on the Arlington Lawn.
For the fascinating history on these steamy emporiums’ heyday, drop into the Fordyce Bathhouse, which now serves as headquarters for the national park that grew up alongside Hot Springs.
Between the Gilded Age and the gangster era, hot water was considered medicine for everything from syphilis to polio. And ranger-led tours of Fordyce juxtapose the building’s art nouveau opulence with wince-inducing tales of bygone hydrotherapies that put the “Ahhh!” in “spa.”
Beyond the bathhouse
Outside the marbled walls, things get even wilder.
On a recent June morning, the tree-lined Central Avenue — typically Hot Springs’ serene main drag — has become a watery danger zone. Ponchos are highly recommended. Mascara? A terrible miscalculation.
Spectators at Hot Spring's annual Running of the Tubs blast competitors with super soakers as they run past.
Soon, heats of “stock tubs” aka decorated bathtubs on wheels will be filled with water and raced down this thoroughfare by costumed teams. And everyone in town, it seems, has lined up along The World Championship Running of the Tubs’ quarter-mile route to drench competitors, judges and hapless passersby with super soakers.
The big parties in Hot Springs tend to skew “zany,” according to tourism marketing director Bill Solleder. “There must be something magical in the water,” he joked.
Other major annual events include Güdrun mountain bike festival, the Spa-Con celebration of all things comic book, and The World’s Shortest St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The latter crams floats, walking krewes, the world’s largest potato on wheels and celeb grand marshals like Kevin Bacon and Bo Derek into a wee, 98-foot route for a crowd of around 30,000 each March 17.
Event weekends aside, visitors to Hot Springs will find plenty of life downtown.
Linked to the Malco Lounge, beloved local illusionist Maxwell Blade performs regularly in a beautifully renovated historic auditorium. And nearby the campy Central Theater serves as home base for the Mid-South Drag Revue as well as sporadic burlesque performances, pole dancing showcases and cult movie screenings.
Maxine's in downtown Hot Springs takes its name from the notorious madam that ran her business upstairs. Today, it boasts craft cocktails and live music on weekends.
Late at night, the plastic cup crowd migrates to Starlite Club for black-light DJed dance parties. Craft cocktail seekers might hit Maxine’s, named for the mink-loving madam of Spa City’s most notorious brothel. She ran her business on the building’s top floor.
And, of course, Arkansas’ oldest bar is a must-see.
In its century-plus in business, The Ohio Club has transitioned through various stages of legality and served as home away from home to vacationing mobsters like Lucky Luciano and Al Capone. These days, find live music, icy martinis and an elbow-to-elbow crowd on busy Friday and Saturday evenings.
More mainstream attractions
For those who like their lace a little straighter, Hot Springs offers less strange amusements, too.
Bathhouse Soapery & Caldarium in downtown Hot Springs offers a staggering selection of fragrant, house-made soaps and sundries.
On a sunny Sunday afternoon, a clerk inside Bathhouse Soapery and Caldarium stirs a bath bomb into a giant jar of water, dissolving it into a hill of delightful pastel bubbles. All around colorful stacks of bar soap and other house-made sundries perfume the bright and airy space.
A stroll down Central Avenue is an eclectic choose-your-own-adventure experience. Shoppers are as likely to find a store like this one as a Madam Toussaud’s. Specialty sweet shops and chic boutiques mix with kitschy gift shops and Zoltar machines.
Farther afield, the Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort just debuted a $100 million makeover that includes a new luxury hotel, more games and an extended racing season. Nearby, the 210-acre Garvan Woodland Gardens are positively transportive. Don’t miss the soaring pine-and-glass Anthony Chapel or the nationally renowned Garden of the Pine Wind, where a winding path leads guests along picturesque bridges and sparkling cascades.
And just past the outskirts of town lies one of the most unique Hot Springs experiences of all.
Tours of Ron Coleman Mining just outside of Hot Springs take visitors via vintage Army transport truck through its commercial crystal mining operation.
About a dozen guests in sunblock and sturdy shoes are piled into the back of an old Army transport truck, which slowly climbs the red hills of Ron Coleman Mining past massive machinery and turquoise wastewater pools. The pros here are hard at work harvesting veins of crystal quartz that formed here 300 million years ago thanks to the region’s unique geology.
Later the group will dig through four acres of the commercial mine’s tailings. “What you want to look for,” the tour guide confides, “is dirt that has the consistency of peanut butter.”
Whatever hidden treasures guests find, they can keep or sell — maybe for enough to fund the next vacation.
Do you have a favorite regional travel destination? Email Jessica Fender at jessica.fender@gmail.com.
