Taking A Bath!

One of my favorite things that we did in Hot Springs was a tour of an old bath house. Hot Springs is obviously known for their hot springs water, and consequently, they are also known for their bathhouses from back in the day. On the main drag in downtown on one side of the street, it's just bathhouse after bathhouse. Unfortunately, most of them aren't operating anymore since there isn't a market for that, but some have remained spas of some sort. Some have turned into office space.

The visitors center is located in the Fordyce Bath House, which has been restored and turned into a bathhouse museum of sorts. You get to (for free!) walk throughout all 4 floors (3 floors and a basement) and look at what an old bathhouse was really like back at the turn of the century. SO COOL! (Sidenote - I am SUCH a history nerd...)

OK, here goes - this is a shot out the front door of the bath house - the other side of the street is all cute shops, the side we were on was all bathhouses.

Here is a view down 'Bathhouse Row' - just one after another and they were all different. SO COOL.

This is the lobby of the bathhouse - so pretty with decorated tile floors. Outside, they also had a veranda with rocking chairs - just like it would've been back in the day.

This is the "men's parlor" area on the 2nd floor. This is where they would sit and hang out in between treatments or baths.

This is a shot of the 'women's parlor' where the women hung out and talked.

This looked really creepy to me when I first walked into the room. It was a spa/bath for people who needed physical therapy or for people who were disabled/paralyzed and needed to be lowered into the bath by that hoist.

Here's an actual picture of the lady getting treatments by a therapist in that exact bath!

This was the beauty parlor on the women's side.

Here's the gymnasium on the top floor!

Here's the dressing/lounge area for the women...

These were tanks that you got into and then only your head was poking out. I don't know if they were filled with water or just hot air? They look like some sort of dungeon torture device to me!

Here's an original bathtub in the women's side of the bathhouse. Most of the stalls also had a stand-up shower in the back of them - probably to rinse off? And all of the bathtubs were in their own private stalls and there would be an assistant to help you in and out of the tub and sometimes would scrub you! Weird!

And this was the next room over - The Cooling Room - just some metal chaise lounge chairs for them to lay on and cool off.

Here's a lady in an old-fashioned jacuzzi!

This is the hallway that connects the mens area and the womens area. Super cool tile floors throughout the whole building and it felt like an old hospital or something. Very neat.

This was a room for physical therapy....

Here's the entrance to the men's bath area.

This is a stand-up shower with weird jets that hit you from all angles when you went in there. It looks awfully industrial and scary to me!

The men's area actually has a big statue in the middle of the room and it was a fountain at one point. Very cool.

This is a shot in the basement - it's opened up so that you can see the real hot spring water that is just below the building. They felt that it had healing powers so that is why the bathhouses were so popular.

And all along the main drag in downtown, you would see these fountains and the water coming out of them was very hot - it was hot spring water coming straight from the ground!