A Town That Refused the Grid

Eureka Springs is one of the few American towns where you genuinely cannot navigate by a grid, because there is no grid. Almost every other town platted in the nineteenth century was laid out on a checkerboard of streets meeting at right angles, a blank template imposed on the land regardless of what the land had to say about it. Eureka Springs had nothing like a blank canvas.

It grew on a hillside folded into ravines, crossed by a creek, interrupted by springs and outcroppings of Ozark limestone. The streets followed the terrain instead of overriding it, and the result is a place where almost no two streets meet at a right angle, where some properties are accessible only by stairway, where a single building can have a front door on two different streets at two different elevations. Walking downtown Eureka Springs takes far longer than the map suggests, because the streets climb and wind around the hillsides.

The town has more than a dozen named stairway connections linking upper streets to lower ones, the most famous of which include a ninety-nine step flight descending from the upper neighborhoods. The Basin Park Hotel in the center of town is famous for having an entrance at ground level on several of its floors, because the hill climbs steeply behind the building. This street system, which would have frustrated any conventional city planner, is actually one of Eureka Springs' greatest assets.

The town cannot be taken in from a single vantage point. Every corner reveals something new.