Bathhouse Row: Eight Edwardian Palaces and the Thermal Economy

Between eighteen ninety-two and nineteen twenty-three, eight monumental bathhouses rose along Central Avenue in Hot Springs, each built to process a national health-tourism economy that believed the thermal water could cure what medicine at the time largely could not. The Fordyce Bathhouse, the grandest of the eight, opened in nineteen fifteen with stained-glass skylights, a rooftop sundeck, a gymnasium with mechanical exercise equipment, a bowling alley, and an orchestra that played while patients soaked. The building cost two hundred twelve thousand dollars at nineteen-fifteen prices.

The thermal water arrived at the spigots at about sixty degrees Celsius, too hot to bathe in directly. The bathhouses ran elaborate mixing and temperature-regulation systems to bring individual baths to the prescribed therapeutic temperature for each condition being treated. Rheumatism required a different protocol than syphilis, which required a different protocol than simple exhaustion. The federal government, as the owner of the springs, was simultaneously the landlord of the bathhouse operators and the ostensible regulator of the water quality and the bathing regimens. It was not, by any account, a rigorously enforced regulatory relationship.

At peak operation in the nineteen tens and twenties, Bathhouse Row processed tens of thousands of visitors per season. Patients came from across the country on railroad passes. The Army and Navy Hospital treated soldiers and sailors at federal expense. Tuberculosis patients mixed on the promenade with professional athletes and wealthy tourists.

The Fordyce is now the National Park Service visitor center for Hot Springs National Park. You can walk through the stained-glass fountain room, the men's bath hall, and the machine room where the century-old exercise equipment still stands. Seven of the eight original bathhouses survive. The Quapaw, at the north end of the Row, was restored and reopened for actual bathing. The water still comes from the same source it always did.