Taking a Bath : Landmarks: In Hot Springs, Ark., civic leaders wrestle with money problems in attempt to keep historic Bathhouse Row from going down the drain.

The plaster is flaking off the interior of the Quapaw Bathhouse, and paint obscures what had been a fine stained-glass ceiling.

The Ozark Bathhouse is in much the same fix. Time has eroded its splendor, taken its beauty and turned it into a steamy old building with a padlock on the front door.

The great old days are gone, and Hot Springs’ renowned Bathhouse Row, where the famous and infamous bathed side by side in spring water heated deep within the Earth, is slowly eroding. Only two of the seven bathhouses still operate, and one of those is a visitors’ center run by the National Park Service.

Mayor Melinda Baran says tourists are always asking her: Why on Earth are these being allowed to deteriorate so? How can something on the list of national historic landmarks, with such a rich past, slowly crumble as the years drift by?

The answer, as in most cases like this, is money. Big money. The kind of money a town this size doesn’t have. Until recently, though, that didn’t seem to be a problem. The bathhouses had their sugar daddy in Melvyn Bell.

Hot Springs’ civic leaders thought the fate of the bathhouses had been solved four years ago when Bell, a rich Arkansas businessman, pledged to return them to their former glory. But Bell, who made his fortune in the hazardous-waste business, fell on hard times.

His business empire began to crumble even faster than the five dilapidated bathhouses. His wife filed for divorce. He had a heart attack, then open-heart surgery.

And so in May he abruptly forfeited his 50-year lease on the bathhouses, leaving Hot Springs in something of a lurch. In a statement he released at the time, Bell said the renovations had been a “labor of love”--but one that he could not continue.

“We thought we were on track to really bring life back to the bathhouses,” says Roger Giddings, superintendent of the Hot Springs National Park, where the structures once frequented by the likes of Al Capone, Harry Truman and Babe Ruth are located.

Baran still resents the fact that it took Bell all this time to decide he could do nothing for the bathhouses. The buildings have only deteriorated more in those four years.

Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. pledged his assistance to Bathhouse Row when he visited Hot Springs in July, but at a time of the shrinking federal dollar, no one is taking that as a panacea.

“If it comes down to giving George Washington on Mt. Rushmore a nose job or redoing the bathhouses, you know which one is going to get the priority,” says Clay Ferrar, a Hot Springs lawyer who heads the governor’s task force on the buildings.

The park service is required by law to maintain the structures, but as Lujan said when he visited Hot Springs, “If we just keep the shells standing, we might as well be tearing them down, for all the good it’s doing.”

The hot springs that made this place famous have been a part of American life for centuries. Explorer Hernando De Soto is said to have tasted the warm waters, long known and used by the Indians of the region for their healing powers.

In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson sent an expedition into the Ouachita Mountains to report on the hot springs, which he had heard about from a friend.

In 1832 President Andrew Jackson declared the springs a federal reservation. The Arkansas Gazette predicted in 1892 that Hot Springs would be “the greatest resort city in the country and the most celebrated in the world.”

For a while, that prediction was not far off. At one point, outlaws Cole Younger and Jesse and Frank James made a good living robbing people on their way to the springs via stagecoach. Many years later, Younger returned to Hot Springs to preach against the evils of banditry, and Frank James settled down to run a concession stand in town.

After a fire in 1913 destroyed more than 1,000 buildings in the center of the city, a boom began that led to the construction of the present Bathhouse Row. Each bathhouse was better than the last, and people flocked from all over, not only to bathe in the 143-degree waters but also to gamble and party.

Capone and other mobsters used Hot Springs as a place to cool out between their territorial wars, and Truman had a favorite place in the town to play small-stakes poker.

The prizefighters John L. Sullivan, Jim Corbett and Jack Dempsey used Hot Springs as a place to train, as did the Chicago Cubs, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Boston Red Sox. Ruth regularly stopped by for a bathing treatment before joining the New York Yankees at the start of the season.

“A lot of good folks and bad folks were here,” says Mayor Baran.

All in all, it was a grand time, what the Saturday Evening Post called a “low, evil, up-all-night, bad-example-setting extremely comfortable life.”

Those good old, wild old days of Hot Springs began to change, though, in the mid-1970s, when the city was part of a federal crackdown on illegal gambling. Even before that, modern medicine began to shy away from the springs as a cure-all for health problems ranging from syphilis to sore eyes.

“Modern medicine sort of did us in,” says Melinda Gassaway, editor of the Hot Springs Sentinel Record.

Actually, the whole downtown area started looking a bit long in the tooth until a revitalization program began about five years ago. About the same time, an artist who uses only the name Benini discovered Hot Springs, and he has been working, with some success, to make the town an art colony.

Today Central Avenue is lined with a number of galleries, including Benini’s, and artists from across the country ship their works there.

Near the far end of Bathhouse Row is the Buckstaff; to enter it is to enter another time. Attendants dressed in white pants and T-shirts run the spring water into oversized white tubs for bathers, prepare the hot towels for afterward and swath the patrons in sheets--the same way it has been done for generations.

Some still believe in the waters’ restorative powers, and many fill jugs from the public spigots and take them home to drink. The spring water is sterile; NASA used it to hold the original moon rocks brought to Earth, when contamination from outer space was feared.

Now Giddings, the park superintendent, estimates that complete renovation of the bathhouses could cost $2 million to $4 million per building. The park service will be spending several million dollars for such items as new roofs and asbestos removal, but those efforts are simply to keep the structures from deteriorating even more.

What the park service wants is a partner, or group of partners, to come in and open businesses in the bathhouses that have closed. Mayor Baran says she thinks she has a multinational solution to the problem--namely, to entice countries with distinctive massage techniques to take over the bathhouses.

She suggests, for instance, that the Japanese and Swedish governments might want to take over two of the bathhouses as places to showcase their particular brand of massage.

“I think it’s going to take a foreign government or a large corporation,” she says. “The mistake we made that lost us time was putting all our eggs in one basket.”

Whether foreign countries would even be interested in showcasing their massage techniques in Arkansas remains to be seen. But Giddings says it is essential to get moving on the matter of finding stable tenants for Bathhouse Row.

“These are more than just buildings; these are historic structures,” he says. “So many people realize the importance of the bathhouses, not only to the park, but also to the city. Whoever we lease them to will have to be able to rehabilitate them and have staying power. We don’t want people to come in and then realize they don’t have the funds to operate the building.”