Fordyce Bathhouse Visitor Center and Museum

Fordyce Bathhouse is a 28,000-square-foot historic bathhouse on Central Avenue that now serves as Hot Springs National Park’s visitor center and museum. It’s Bathhouse Row’s largest building and the best first stop if you want to understand what brought people to town. The free self-guided tour covers three floors and a basement; it’s a museum now, with no bathing service. Find it between the Maurice and Quapaw bathhouses at 369 Central Avenue. For an outside photo, include the stone entrance pillars with the patterned facade to show where Fordyce sits on the Row.

The first floor starts with a marble lobby, stained-glass transoms and marble partitions in the bath hall. Take a moment with the finishes; this was a public bathhouse built to feel as impressive as the treatments it offered. The second floor has exhibits about bathing and health, preserved dressing and massage rooms, and a display of a Zander mechanical exercise machine. Upstairs, the Music Room, State Rooms and Gymnasium show how much more the building offered than a place to soak.

Don’t skip the basement. Fordyce Spring and the original Otis elevator mechanisms are on view there, and public restrooms and water are on the same floor. Seeing the spring itself helps the rest of the tour make sense: this whole elaborate building was organized around Hot Springs’ thermal water.

The Fordyce opened on March 1, 1915. Little Rock architects Mann and Stern designed it, and John Fordyce supervised construction for his father, owner Sam Fordyce. At about 28,000 square feet, it was the largest bathhouse on the Row. It was also the only one with a bowling alley, a reminder that the bathhouse experience included recreation as well as treatment.

Fordyce was the first Bathhouse Row bathhouse to stop bathing operations, closing on June 30, 1962 as therapeutic bathing declined. It sat vacant until an extensive restoration brought it back as the park’s visitor center and museum in 1989. The Park Service chose it as the Row’s most elegant building to preserve, so the original rooms and machinery are still the main attraction.

The landscaped walk along Bathhouse Row hides Hot Springs Creek. In 1882–83, the creek was enclosed in an underground arch for flood and sewerage control, then the area above it was landscaped. That work helped make the broad promenade outside Fordyce, where the bathhouses once drew people to the springs, feel like a civic main street rather than a stream bank.