Bathing Beauties
The National Park Service Is Restoring Arkansas' Century-Old Bathhouses.
By Zoie Clift | Online Only | May 30, 2008
Bathhouse Row in Hot Springs, Ark., is undergoing an $18 million renovation.
Credit: Zoie Clift
Things are heating up on "Bathhouse Row," in Arkansas' Hot Springs National Park. Long idle and once endangered, the row of eight bathhouses owned by the National Park Service are now being stabilized and transformed. In June, the 87-year-old Quapaw Bathhouse will re-open as a luxury spa. Workers are also converting the Lamar bathhouse into exhibit space and needed offices, and the Park Service continues to negotiate with a nonprofit group hoping to convert the Ozark bathhouse into a Museum of Contemporary Art.
The Row, described as "the grandest collection of bathhouses of [their] kind in the nation," is a National Historic Landmark District with structures dating to the early 1900s. After the National Trust for Historic Preservation added Bathhouse Row to its list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in 2003, the Park Service renewed rehabilitation of six vacant bathhouses to make them suitable for new tenants. Since then, the government has invested $18 million in the project.
"After 22 years of watching tourists walk up to bathhouse doors and attempt to get into the locked facilities, we are certain of the interest in at least entering the buildings to look around," says Anthony Taylor of the local Taylor/Kempkes, Architects, P.A., who is overseeing the Quapaw renovation. "We are confident that this interest extends to people actually wanting to enjoy the thermal baths and spa-related activities."
Last September, crews began converting the historic Spanish Colonial revival Quapaw into a modern spa that will be handicapped-accessible while also qualifying for Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) certification for energy efficiency.
The domed 1922 Quapaw Bathhouse is now a spa.
Credit: Zoie Clift
The 24,000-square-foot bathhouse's most impressive exterior feature is its large central dome, covered with colored mosaic tiles and capped with a small copper cupola. Inside, visitors will choose from three communal soaking pools of varying temperatures, all cooled significantly from the 142 degrees at which the natural spring water emerges from the ground. Stained-glass skylights allow light into each pool. Directly above the entrance, visitors will notice a cartouche with a carved Indian head set into the decorative double-curved parapet. That Indian motif found throughout the building reinforces a legend that claimed that the Indians had discovered the magical healing powers of the spring and cave.
From the very beginning park superintendent Josie Fernandez said she witnessed sensitivity to preservation by Quapaw Baths LLC, the company that has signed a 55-year lease on the 1922 building.
"All the clay square tiles that were part of the original interior walls were taking down one at a time … subway tiles were carefully removed so that could be reused in other places." she says.
The project represented a juggling act of historic building restrictions, ADA requirements, and LEED certification. It also represented a balance between preserving the past and adapting to the times.
"Adaptive reuse of this building required a reinterpretation of virtually the same original building program - bathing in naturally hot mineral spring water - filtered through the changes in the social, cultural, and medical fields that have occurred over the past 80 years," says Taylor, who is renovating Quapaw with fellow architect Bob Kempkes, Hot Springs businessman Don Harper, and New York businessman Steve Strauss.
When the building was first constructed, antibiotics were not widely known or used, so doctors routinely prescribed thermal bathing and hydrotherapy as a treatment of ailments from arthritis to syphilis. Once antibiotics became common, the use of the baths for most medicinal functions virtually ceased. Fast forward to the 21st century, when naturally hot thermal springs are prized for their therapeutic value and the use of spa facilities for pleasure and relaxation is at an all-time high.
When the Quapaw Bathhouse opened, each bather had an individual tub staffed by an attendant. “While we are utilizing some of the original bathing cubicles for private tub bathing, our more modern approach to thermal bathing includes open pools for co-ed use and a self-guided regimen of hydrotherapy,” Taylor says. “The most critical aspect of this newer approach was the demolition of the private cubicles in the former Men's Bathing Hall, beneath a 75-foot-long stained-glass skylight.”
Restoration of the Quapaw Bathhouse in Hot Springs, Ark.
Credit: Zoie Clift
Taylor said that after discussions with the State Historic Preservation Officer it was agreed that as one of seven bathhouses in a National Historic Landmark District, some modifications such as the demolition of these cubicles could be allowed in this adaptive reuse since one bathhouse has already been preserved as the visitors center (complete with Men's bathing cubicles), and five more are untouched since the 1970s, their bathing halls intact.
Now, with the opening of the Quapaw, the revival of Bathhouse Row continues. Fernandez says the Park Service will accept requests for proposals for long-term leases on the last three vacant bathhouses, the Superior, the Hale and the Maurice through Sept. 30. (The Buckstaff is already a functioning bathhouse, and the Fordyce remains the park's visitors center and museum.)
"With the completion of one privately financed and operated bathhouse, we hope that others are encouraged to invest their time and efforts to bring more of the buildings back to life," Taylor says. "As with all entertainment districts, the more the better, and we hope to see the other bathhouses restored to their original functions and therefore see the park restored to its former place as one of America's premier spa locations."
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