How One Deal Killed America's Original Sin City: Hot Springs, Arkansas

For a hundred years, Hot Springs, Arkansas was the most wide-open city in America — a place where Bathhouse Row and illegal casinos shared the same stretch of Central Avenue, where Al Capone rented an entire floor of the Arlington Hotel, and where Owney Madden, the most feared gangster in New York, retired to raise chickens with the postmaster's daughter. Grand hotels rose along the mountain. Babe Ruth discovered his power swing at Whittington Park. Tony Bennett first rehearsed "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" inside a nightclub called the Vapors, owned by a local boss gambler named Dane Harris who had turned down a partnership in Las Vegas because he thought Hot Springs was the better bet. By the early 1960s, five million visitors a year poured into this small city in the Ouachita Mountains, and more than $18 million in new hotel construction was underway. Then, in 1967, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller vetoed a bill to legalize gambling — a bill the legislature had passed, a bill the gambling operators believed he had promised to sign. State troopers burned the casino equipment and buried it twenty feet underground. The brand-new Velda Rose Towers Hotel rented ten of its two hundred rooms. The Southern Club became a wax museum. And everything Hot Springs had built over a century collapsed in a matter of months — while Las Vegas, in those same years, passed the corporate ownership laws that would turn a desert outpost into the entertainment capital of the world. Sources David Hill, The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America's Forgotten Capital of Vice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) Encyclopedia of Arkansas — entries on Hot Springs, Owney Madden, the Vapors, the Southern Club, Quincy Byrum Hurst, Winthrop Rockefeller, Bathhouse Row, and Major League Spring Training in Hot Springs "The Hottest Spring in Hot Springs," Sports Illustrated, March 19, 1962 "How Politics and Religion Handicapped Hot Springs in the Race to Become America's Chief Gambling Resort," Arkansas Times, April 1, 2021 "Death and Rebirth" (series on Hot Springs gambling, 1927–1967), Hot Springs Sentinel Record, May 30, 2018 "The Library of Congress Remembers Tony Bennett," Now See Hear! blog, Library of Congress, July 21, 2023