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[Jock]

Along the way I have already taken in a game with some friends!

[Jock]

I better get ready to caught the fly ball!

[Jock]

And of course if I need a H-D Tee, they have me covered!

[Jock]

Last year I went to the Clinton Library on the way to the Meeting in the Middle.  This year, it would be the birthplace of Bill Clinton.

[Jock]

I had just missed the Running of the Bath Tubs.  I was sure that Bill had been there since he may have thought that the contestants were naked when they race.  Hey wait a minute!  I should have been there too then!      

[Jock]

Speaking of Oddities…unfortunately this place is not open on Saturday and Sunday.

[Jock]

Hot springs in the middle of town?

Water. That's what first attracted people, and they have been coming here ever since to use these soothing thermal waters to heal and relax. Rich and poor alike came for the baths, and a thriving city built up around the hot springs. Together nicknamed "The American Spa," Hot Springs National Park today surrounds the north end of the city.

[Jock]

Bathhouse Row is a collection of bathhouses, associated buildings, and gardens.

[Jock]

The Lamar Bathhouse was completed in 1923 in a transitional style often used in clean-lined commercial buildings of the time that were still not totally devoid of elements left over from various classical revivals: symmetry, cornices, and vague pediments articulating the front entrance.

The sun porch leads into the lobby, whose north, south, and east walls are covered with murals of architectural and country scenes. Facilities including cool rooms, pack rooms and bath halls are on this floor, with the men's at the north and the women's at the south. Centered in the building is the stair core that receives natural light from a skylight above. The second floor contains massage rooms, a writing room, dressing rooms, and a gymnasium. The partial basement houses attendant rooms and mechanical equipment. The building's bathhouse operations ended in November 1985.

[Jock]

Completed in 1912, the elegantly designed Buckstaff Baths operates under National Park Service regulations, its well-trained staff provides a range of services from tradition thermal mineral baths and body massages to Swedish style full body massages. The bathing tubs are private and bathing suits are optional, although visitors may cover themselves between the bathing stations.  Services begin with a "Whirlpool Mineral Bath" for $35.00

The cream-colored brick building is neoclassical in style with the base, spandrels, friezes, cornices and the parapet finished in white stucco. It was a radical departure from the fanciful structures that preceded it, and compared to the Irish House of Parliament or the Treasury Building.  The entrance is divided into seven bays by engaged columns, with a pavilion on each end.

[Jock]

The Ozark Bathhouse was completed in 1922 and designed by George Mann and Eugene John Stern of Little Rock. The building closed for use as a bathhouse in 1977.

On the interior, the central lobby has a marble counter with hallways to the men's and women's facilities on either side. Mirrors cover the walls in the lobby. The floor of the sun porch is covered with quarry tile, and most of the remaining floors in the building are finished with acrylic tile. Ceilings are concrete and painted plaster. Interior walls are brick and hollow tile finished with plaster.

The two-story 37-room Spanish Colonial Revival building, approximately 14,000 square feet, is constructed of brick and concrete masonry finished with stucco. The structure is trapezoidal in plan, although the impressive front elevation is symmetrically designed with twin towers composed of three-tiered setbacks flanking the main entrance. The main entrance is accessed through an enclosed sun porch, a later addition set between two pavilions that form the visual bases of the towers above them.

[Jock]

The Quapaw bathhouse was built in 1922 in a Spanish Colonial Revival style building of masonry and reinforced concrete finished with stucco. The most striking exterior feature is the large central dome covered with brilliantly colored tiles and capped with a small copper cupola. The building's use as a bathhouse ended in 1984 when the last contract ended. A new lease was signed with the National Park in 2007 and the Quapaw Bath house reopened as Quapaw Baths & Spa in July 2008.

The Quapaw Bathhouse was built on the sites of two earlier bathhouses, the Horseshoe and the Magnesia, which resulted in its large land assignment on Bathhouse Row. The moderately priced bathhouse services were designed to serve the public at rates set somewhere between the lower-priced Superior and the luxurious Maurice. With an original capacity of 40 tubs the building was expected to handle about three times as many bathers as the Hale or Superior.

[Jock]

Construction began on the new Maurice Bathhouse in 1911 and was completed by 1912. The building was designed by George Gleim, Jr. of Chicago. The building was remodeled in 1915, following a design by George Mann and Eugene John Stern of Little Rock, which added the front sun parlor and made the white hygienic appearance warmer and more luxurious.

The exterior of the Maurice Bathhouse is simple yet elegant in design. The interior of the Maurice – patterned after the most successful contemporary European spas – was one of the best equipped and luxurious early-20th-century American bathhouses. The Maurice is probably the best example on Bathhouse Row of a bathhouse specially designed using concrete, metal, and ceramic elements to furnish a hygienic atmosphere and specially equipped with the ultimate in early-20th-century bathing technology. Technologically advanced heating, ventilating, and vacuum-cleaning systems were installed in the Maurice to provide a comfortable, healthy atmosphere for the bather. A therapeutic pool was installed in the Maurice in 1931 to treat various forms of paralysis (spurred on by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's treatments at Warm Springs, Georgia).  At this time it was also the first of the Hot Springs bathhouses to provide specialized treatment for polio and other severe muscular and joint problems, being the only one to employ a registered physical therapist.

[Jock]

The northernmost bathhouse on the row is the Superior which was completed in 1916 and designed by architect Harry C. Schwebke of Hot Springs, Arkansas. The building is designed in an eclectic commercial style of Classical Revival origin. The building has two stories and a basement, is L-shaped in plan and is constructed of brick masonry and reinforced concrete. It contains 23 rooms and is more than 10,000 square feet (930 m2). The building was constructed on the site of a 1880s Victorian style Superior bathhouse. Brick from the previous bathhouse may have been reused in this structure.

[Jock]

This facility was the first Army and Navy general hospital in the United States constructed in 1887.