Arlington Hotel (Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arlington Hotel at head of Central Avenue after 1925.

The Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa is a nearly 500 room resort in the Ouachita Mountains of Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas, home of Oaklawn Race Track and the Arkansas Derby.

The resort's accommodations range for groups between 20 and 2000. There are spring-fed Mineral Baths and Massages in the Arlington Spa. The hotel provides three restaurants, and guests enjoy golf and tennis privileges at the Hot Springs Country Club.

It is located just north of "Bathhouse Row".

[edit] History

Constructed in 1893, the second Arlington Hotel contained 300 rooms.

Samuel W. Fordyce and two other entrepreneurs financed the construction of the first luxury hotel in the area, the first Arlington Hotel which opened in 1875. When it was rebuilt in 1892-93, it was known as the New Arlington, and boasted of its Spanish Renaissance architecture. With 300 rooms in four stories of red brick, it had corner towers. This second Arlington burned to the ground on April 5, 1923. Those buildings were at the north end of Bathhouse Row, where the Arlington Park then was created. The third Arlington Hotel, designed by Mann and Stern in 1925, is the current hotel at the "Y" intersection at the corner of Central Avenue and Fountain Street. The building's huge size, Spanish-Colonial Revival style, and placement at the terminus of the town's most important vista made the building a key Hot Springs landmark. The original site became a park at the north end of Bathhouse Row.^[1]

In the 1930s, the Arlington Hotel was a favorite vacation spot for Al Capone.[1]