Hot Springs and the Gangster Era

According to local histories and National Park Service interpretive materials, Al Capone kept a suite at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs during multiple extended visits through the nineteen twenties and thirties. The same sources describe Owney Madden, the New York mob figure who had run Harlem's Cotton Club, eventually retiring to Hot Springs and living there quietly for the remainder of his life. These accounts are well established in local memory. The scholarly monograph that would fully document the Hot Springs gangster era has not yet been written, and researchers note that much of the primary documentation remains in local archives rather than national collections.

What is not in dispute is the general shape of what Hot Springs was during this period: an open city. Casinos operated on Central Avenue without serious police interference. The local political structure, running through multiple mayors and police chiefs over several decades, maintained an informal arrangement under which gambling, prostitution, and related enterprises were tolerated in exchange for a kind of civic order. The arrangement persisted because it was profitable for enough of the right people and because the federal government, as the landlord of the thermal springs that gave the city its identity, seemed content to look away from what went on in the commercial district.

The open-city era finally collapsed under sustained federal pressure in the nineteen sixties, when a series of raids and prosecutions under a reform prosecutorial office broke the gambling infrastructure that had operated in plain sight for four decades. By then the bathhouse economy had already begun its long decline, and the two things that had made Hot Springs singular, therapeutic water and tolerated vice, were both on their way out at once.

The city Bill Clinton grew up in, through the nineteen fifties and early sixties, was still a version of this Hot Springs. He has written about it.