After sitting vacant for more than a half century, a historic bathhouse in Hot Springs is poised to get a facelift.
The Maurice Bathhouse served visitors seeking to benefit from the city’s healing waters from its inception in 1912 until it closed in 1974. On Tuesday, officials with the National Park Service broke ground on a new $31.6 million renovation project.
Hot Springs National Park Superintendent Laura Miller says the end goal is to lease out the refurbished building to re-open it to visitors.
“Despite many past efforts to lease this building, the sheer size of it and the work that needed to go into it was just cost-prohibitive to any single businessperson trying to come in and finish it out and put in a business,” Miller said. “We needed to have a way to do a lot of the substantial work on the building so that we could then lease it out to a private business owner, as we have some of the other buildings.”
Miller refers to the seven other historic bathhouses on Hot Springs’ Bathhouse Row. While only one, the Buckstaff Bathhouse, has remained continually operational since the row’s heyday around the turn of the 20th Century, six others have found new purposes as breweries, spas and visitor centers.
The Maurice Bathhouse is the last on the row to remain vacant.
Miller says upgrades to building’s foundation, windows and roof, as well as its plumbing, fire suppression and electrical systems, are all on the list for the renovation.
The roughly $32 million in funding for the project – which will also go toward improvements to other bathhouses in Hot Springs – comes from federal legislation known as the Great American Outdoors Act. Passed in 2020, the law dedicated $9.5 billion dollars over a five-year span to address a maintenance backlog at national parks across the country.
Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman, who represents Arkansas’ 4th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, said he hopes to persuade Congress to continue funding similar projects.
“It’s our job in Congress, it’s my job as the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, to make sure that we get the Great American Outdoors Act… re-authorized for the upcoming year, so that we can continue to do great things, not just here in Hot Springs, but also around the country,” Westerman said.
Westerman says the House Natural Resources Committee plans to hold field hearings at several of the country’s national parks, including Hot Springs, in the coming months.
Construction on the Maurice Bathhouse renovation is set to begin this fall.
