The late afternoon sun peeking through the low hills of the Ouachita Mountains washes the colorful facades of historic buildings with golden, softly spun light. The sunbeams are warm and practically glowing as my husband and I walk down the tree-lined sidewalk of Central Avenue, the main thoroughfare in Arkansas' Hot Springs National Park, taking in the turn-of-the-20th-century architecture of Bathhouse Row. Both sides of the street contain an eclectic mix of influences, a fruit-basket turnover of Renaissance Revival, Victorian, Spanish Revival and a few more. Some Greek. Some Mediterranean. Some Italianate. It’s so very European but without the need for a passport.
The allure of the bathhouses brought us back to Hot Springs, where we had briefly visited years before on a quick side trip from Memphis where hubby had been working at the time. Because of the intriguing history of Hot Springs and its mineral-rich, near-mythical hot springs, we chose to return for a getaway that was slower paced and just for us.
Hot Springs National Park is cocooned by the small city of Hot Springs, which is in turn cocooned by the Ouachita. Driving in from Little Rock, the Ouachita stretch scenically for miles across the landscape, their verdant peaks and valleys and blue lakes bathed in sunlight. Much like the range's well-known cousins of the Ozarks to the north, the Ouachita are dwarfish as compared to the venerable Appalachians or Rockies, rising only to around 2,800 feet.
Hot Springs, the national park, is the oldest park in the National Park Service system. While it didn’t earn national park status until 1921, it was in 1832 that President Andrew Jackson set aside the hot springs as a special reservation. It’s also one of the smallest national parks, measuring in at 5,549 acres. Compare that to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska, mind-blowingly vast at 13.2 million acres. Only Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis is more diminutive than Hot Springs, with only 192 acres.
Hot Springs is set apart from other hot springs like, say, Yellowstone. Here, beneath the earth’s crust, are thermally heated springs that were created from rainwater that fell about 4,000 years ago. Since then, it’s been percolating underground in what I like to call a fiery furnace before bubbling to the surface for us to cook with, bathe in and drink up. In contrast, the hot springs of Yellowstone and its sister national parks of Wrangell-St. Elias and Haleakala in Hawaii are volcanically heated. Arkansas has no active volcanoes.
All the while hubby and I walk Central Avenue, I’m acutely aware that the springs are simmering somewhere underneath the sidewalk, with the NPS estimating that some 700,000 gallons a day of the 143-degree water flowing up from the springs. That’s a lot of hot water.
But the water isn’t only hot, it’s also said to cure what ails you, to heal you right up from your aches and pains. Throughout the history of Hot Springs, the hot springs have attracted attention from the likes of the Native Americans — the Washita, Caddo, Osage, Chickasaw and Choctaw among them and who called it the “Valley of the Vapors” — to explorers including the intrepid Hernando de Soto to presidents to baseball greats to notorious gangsters (think Al Capone and Lucky Luciano) to health enthusiasts and then to the curious romantics like hubby and me. They, and we, all came to “take the waters,” as the local saying goes, or to “quaff the elixir,” if we drink it.
The first bathhouses were built in the 1830s and were merely wooden structures perched over individual springs. The Grand Resort Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought the more elaborate buildings that remain today, pretty little bathhouses all in a row along Central Avenue. Eight of them are left, all built between 1892 and 1923, with the now-restored Fordyce Bathhouse serving as the NPS’s visitor center.
Of those historic bathhouses, you can still take the waters at Buckstaff Bathhouse or Quapaw Baths and Spa, but the others have been repurposed. Superior is now a brewery, while the Hale has been transformed into a boutique hotel. The Lamar is now a gift shop where you can buy spa products made with local water. The aptly named Ozark is a cultural center, while the Maurice remains vacant.
Getting naked at a spa with complete strangers isn’t exactly my idea of romance, but we couldn’t visit Hot Springs without indulging in the water. We booked spa treatments at the Arlington Hotel and Spa, equally as historic as the bathhouses and first opened in 1875. Decades later, Al Capone kept a suite there year round, so when he wasn’t in hot water with the law, he liked to indulge in the hot water.
With separate treatment facilities for men and women, which is traditional in Hot Springs, hubby retreats to one side and I to the other. Our treatments include a pressurized shower under the steamy water from the hot springs — it is thankfully cooled down from 143 degrees Fahrenheit to about 100 so as not to scald — and a half-hour Swedish massage. Let me come clean and confess. I wasn’t completely naked throughout the treatment, as I was given a warm sheet to swath myself. Modesty always comes first for us Southern Baptists, but some ladies at the spa didn’t seem to mind the nudity at all.
My husband’s idea of a romantic dinner is barbecue and not baguettes and brie — stand back, ladies, he’s all mine — so later we made our way to the iconic McClard’s Bar-B-Que, said to be one of Bill Clinton’s favorite restaurants. You know, before he became a vegetarian, because nothing else about McClard’s is vegetarian. The don’t-miss is the pork ribs, smoky and slow-cooked.
Other dining haunts recommended to us were the Superior Bathhouse Brewery for lunch, where the beer is made from the hot springs. Or Luna Bella for Italian-style fine dining, the Pancake Shop for breakfast, Deluca’s Pizzeria for amazingly tasty pizza, or Best Café and Bar, where the don’t-miss is crème brulee French toast.
For accommodations, we opted for more modern over historic and stayed at Lookout Point Lakeside Inn on Lake Hamilton, about a 20-minute drive from the Historic District. Other options are The Reserve, a new luxury boutique inn that is a former private mansion and national heritage landmark; the luxury Hotel Hale, the oldest structure on Bathhouse Row, or the Best Court Motel, a 1930s-style motor court inn. If your tastes run to the ponies and casino gambling, Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort also has a brand-new hotel.
When I re-tell the story of how I came to be naked in Hot Springs, where I learn that steamy has more to do with taking the waters than it does romance, I’m not lying when I say it’s the bare truth.
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If you go
Information is available at Visit Hot Springs, www.hotsprings.org. Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport at Little Rock, about a 60-minute drive, is the closest major airport and is served by Allegiant, American, Delta, Frontier, Southwest and United. Also visit the National Park Service at www.nps.gov and type “Hot Springs” into the search engine for a detailed history of the park and a wide range of things to do.
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