Before Vegas Became Vegas, Hot Springs Was America's Sin City. Now the Arkansas Spa Town Embraces Its Colorful and Seedy History

A life-size likeness of Al Capone now stands near the center of Hot Springs, Arkansas, an unusually explicit welcome to a past that many American cities might prefer to soften. Visitors can also book the hotel room associated with the Chicago gangster. Those attractions frame a present-day escape in a place whose earlier visitors included underworld figures, entertainers and sports stars, and whose public identity has increasingly made room for that complicated inheritance.

The comparison with Las Vegas helps explain the scale of Hot Springs’ former reputation. In 1931, Las Vegas was a town of roughly 5,000 people without resort properties, according to Raines. Hot Springs, by contrast, had about 20,000 residents and multiple tall hotels. Long before Nevada’s desert city became synonymous with casinos, the Arkansas spa town offered the combination of lodging, leisure and illicit business that drew a national clientele.

Its appeal was not discreet. Gambling operated openly despite Arkansas law, prostitution was readily available, and illegal alcohol could be obtained without much difficulty during the era. The town’s bathing and vacation culture existed alongside that underground economy rather than apart from it. For guests seeking entertainment beyond the springs, Hot Springs could provide an experience that legal restrictions elsewhere made harder to find.

Raines’ account of the period describes a system in which protection reached well beyond individual police officers. He says gangsters could spend time in the city with little fear of arrest because law enforcement had been bought off. The alleged flow of money, he says, extended through local government and state politics, reaching the mayor, judge, city council, governor and legislature. Even churches, in his telling, received a share.

That arrangement made Hot Springs a useful refuge for organized-crime visitors: a destination where they could relax while remaining visible. Capone was reportedly a familiar presence around town rather than a figure confined to a private hideaway. He attended the racetrack, played golf and maintained a fishing cabin beside the Ouachita River, blending pursuits associated with a resort holiday with the notoriety that followed him.

Capone’s transportation became part of the story as well. At times, his green armored Cadillac, a 1928 model, was sent to Hot Springs by train so he could use it there. The car underscored how a trip to Arkansas could be staged as more than a quiet break from Chicago. It also left a tangible object through which the city’s history can be presented to later visitors, rather than recalled only through accounts of vice and political tolerance.

Raines had such an opportunity in 2008, when the Cadillac was borrowed from a Houston collection and placed in the lobby of the Arlington. The vehicle remained on display for two years, offering hotel guests a close view of an artifact linked to Capone’s visits. Its stay ended when it was sold at auction, illustrating both the continuing pull of gangster-era memorabilia and the limits of keeping privately owned history permanently in public view.

Hot Springs’ approach carries an inevitable tension. The same history that makes Capone’s statue and former suite compelling to travelers includes illegal gambling, prostitution, bootlegging and alleged institutional corruption. Presenting the era as part of a tourism experience can preserve public awareness of what occurred, but it can also risk reducing a broad civic system to colorful anecdotes about famous guests. The town’s surviving attractions therefore invite visitors to consider both the glamour attached to the period and the conditions that made it possible.

What comes next is less about recreating that world than about deciding how it should be remembered. Hot Springs remains available as a short-break destination, while its hotels, downtown displays and stories connect current tourism to an earlier chapter. For audiences accustomed to treating Las Vegas as the country’s original capital of vice, the Arkansas town offers a corrective: decades ago, a spa city with high-rise hotels and permissive enforcement had already built a powerful, if unlawful, version of that allure.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine