Between the screens: Hot Springs, Arkansas
This summer my wife, my son, and I flew back to Arkansas to visit my family — my parents and my sister. We spent two days in Hot Springs on Lake Catherine: time on the boat, swimming, fishing, big family dinners, and even a sunburn. A month later I went back, this time to see my friends for our fantasy football draft, on Lake Ouachita (pronounced Wash-uh-tah). Both trips were great. On long days at work — like today — I keep thinking about them and wanting to go back.
So I wanted to write down a few things about Hot Springs that a lot of people don't know. It's a small town with a surprisingly big history.
The hot springs are real, and they're old — the water coming up here fell as rain about four thousand years ago. People have believed for centuries that it heals, and the federal government set the land aside to protect it in 1832 — forty years before Yellowstone. That makes it one of the oldest protected sites in the country. It became a national park in 1921, and by then the town had grown into a spa destination, with a row of grand bathhouses where people came to "take the waters."
One of those old bathhouses is now a brewery. Superior Bathhouse Brewery is the only brewery inside a U.S. national park, and the only brewery anywhere that brews with thermal spring water — the same water the town is famous for.
Hot Springs is also the birthplace of baseball's spring training. In 1886, Cap Anson brought his Chicago White Stockings — now the Cubs — to town to train in the warm weather and use the baths, and spring training as we know it started there. A young Babe Ruth trained in Hot Springs and hit a home run people still talk about. Teams eventually moved to Florida and Arizona, but it began in Arkansas.
Then there's the part that surprised me most. For most of the 20th century, Hot Springs ran wide-open illegal gambling — casinos operating in the open behind storefronts — protected by local politics that reached all the way up to the governor. That made it a getaway for some of the biggest names in organized crime. Al Capone kept a regular room at the Arlington Hotel. Lucky Luciano was living there when he was arrested in 1936. And Owney Madden, a New York gangster, moved to Hot Springs and ran the town's gambling for years.
Here's the part I had backwards: it wasn't that the mob wanted to turn Hot Springs into Vegas. Hot Springs was America's gambling capital before Las Vegas existed. Bugsy Siegel, who built the Las Vegas Strip, is said to have drawn on what already worked in Hot Springs. The casinos were finally shut down in the late 1960s, and Vegas took it from there.
The one kind of gambling that stayed legal is horse racing. Oaklawn has been running races in Hot Springs since 1905, and it's still going today.
So that's Hot Springs: some of the oldest protected land in the country, the birthplace of spring training, a brewery inside a national park, and the gambling town that came before Vegas. Not bad for a place I mostly go to sit on a boat with people I love.
On a day like today, that's exactly where I'd rather be. I'll be back soon.
