These regular and quasi-permanent guests built Hot Springs into one of America’s first resort towns, one that aimed to rival the glitziest spas of prewar Europe. Al Capone would “take the waters” in the 1920s to treat his syphilis. Some of the more popular ailments that patients came to treat were venereal diseases. As visitors to Hot Springs would disembark from their trains, they would be besieged by doctors advertising their services, such as post-bath mercury rubbings. The popularity among professional ball players was so great that Hot Springs eventually became the official spring training location for a number of major and minor league teams, including the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Boston Red Sox, and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Baseball players like Babe Ruth would spend the spring months in Hot Springs, recuperating by soaking in the hot water. Prizefighters like Jack Dempsey trained for fights in Hot Springs in order to be close to the baths. They came to soak in scalding hot baths or to sit in so-called “vapor cabinets,” often on doctors’ orders, to treat everything from diabetes to epilepsy. The hot water brought visitors in search of medicinal qualities it was said to possess. The city’s unofficial motto was “We Bathe the World.” Buy The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice The federal government operated a string of eight bathhouses up and down the block, which piped in the naturally hot water that bubbled up from deep below the earth’s surface and sprang from cracks in the surrounding mountains. The more lush and dense areas of the national park weren’t nearly as popular among visitors as the one-block stretch that lined one side of Central Avenue in downtown Hot Springs, which they called Bathhouse Row. The national park was merely a stretch of federal property smack-dab in the middle of the then-bustling small town. Not in the traditional sense of one, anyway. In fact, it was arguably not even a park at all. On March 4, 1921, when the federal government did finally designate Hot Springs a national park, it had the distinction of being the country’s smallest. In 1832, before Arkansas was even a state, President Andrew Jackson signed legislation designating the land around Hot Springs where the thermal waters flowed from the mountains as federal territory, with the idea that the government could construct medicinal bathhouses. They used to call it “America’s first national park,” because long before there was even a National Park Service, Hot Springs was the first park managed by the federal government. Hot Springs was in the middle of a banner season, welcoming 5 million visitors that year alone-a high-water mark in the city’s history.Īs far back as the 19th century, when Las Vegas was still a dusty smudge on the horizon, Hot Springs had been a popular resort town. The gaming floor was filled to capacity with revelers after a long day of hollering at the track. Hot Springs, Arkansas, is a very different place today-an anonymous Southern city 25 miles from the nearest interstate, the gamblers long since run out of town-but late on a Saturday night in April 1961, at the height of the horse racing season at Oaklawn Park, there was no more exhilarating place to be in the entire country. This was the Vapors, the grandest casino in what was once the premier gambling destination in America. He flung the dice across the table, and the crowd roared. “We’re coming out!” the boxman yelled as Rowe prepared to shoot. The stickman shoved the two dice along the felt and left them right in front of him, and he picked them up and shook them in his fist. Rowe picked his up and placed them in his stack along the rail of the table. The dealers placed the checks down on the felt in front of the winning players. “Five! A no-field five!” yelled the boxman. He was crowded in between the stickman and the other dice players, who were lined up two and three deep at all five tables, making the wide marble-and-crystal-appointed room feel small. Rowe was on one hell of a roll at the dice table. Down in the valley beneath the shadow of Sugarloaf Mountain, where the hot vapors rise from the healing waters of the springs, L.V.
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