Gangster Museum of America

For much of the early twentieth century, Hot Springs was the most relaxed place in America to be a criminal. Gangsters came for the baths and stayed for the casinos, and local authorities mostly looked the other way. Al Capone is the best-known visitor, remembered for holding court at the Arlington Hotel, but he was one of dozens of mob figures who found the town an easy refuge. The Gangster Museum of America, set on Central Avenue in a building steeped in the era, covers more than a hundred years of that history on a guided tour that runs about an hour. It uses artifacts, vintage photographs, film clips and real gambling equipment to explain how a spa town turned into a wide-open resort, who ran it and how it all ended. The tone is lively, a little theatrical and well researched.

The tour is the draw. A guide leads small groups through rooms that tell separate parts of the story: the bathhouse boom that brought the money, the gambling halls that rose to take it, the bootleggers and racketeers who made deals in hotel lobbies, and the political machine that kept the lights on. You will see slot machines, roulette wheels and the kind of gear used to run an illegal game, along with stories of the people who ran the town.

Expect names like Owney Madden, the English-born New York gangster who retired to Hot Springs and was said to run the Southern Club, and Capone, who is remembered as a polite guest who tipped well. Some tours include a look at a replica of a mob-era gambling room.

The story ends in the 1960s, when a reform governor and a state police raid shut down the casinos, a turn that changed the town forever. The museum is honest about the tension between nostalgia and consequence, and it gives time to the lawmen and everyday residents who lived through the era. It also touches on other local legends, from baseball spring training to the town's most famous schoolboy, a future president who grew up here and attended the local high school. Those side stories make the visit richer than a simple mobster tour.

The museum also rewards a bit of homework. If you read about the Arlington Hotel, the Southern Club and the Ohio Club before you arrive, the names on the walls will mean more, and you can walk to several of the buildings in the story within minutes. Ask your guide which downtown corners still carry traces of the era, such as upstairs windows over shops that once held card rooms, and which stories are well documented and which are local legend.

Hot Springs is an enthusiastic teller of tall tales, and good guides are honest about the difference. Allow time afterwards for a coffee on Central Avenue, where the facades and the old hotel lobbies make it easy to picture a slot machine behind every door.