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Photo: Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
From January through April, Oaklawn is the place to be in Arkansas. Watch and wager on live top-quality thoroughbred racing, enjoy delicious food served up at restaurants and stands and participate in contests and promotions. Oaklawn also offers simulcast racing action year-round, plus live casino games and slots (thanks to casinos being legalized in the state in 2019). Some Arkansas Derby winners have also won one or more of the Triple Crown races in Kentucky, Maryland or New York. During the live racing season, children may enter Oaklawn accompanied by a parent or guardian; children attending during the simulcast season must be at least 48 inches tall to be admitted.
Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort, formerly Oaklawn Park Race Track, is an American thoroughbred racetrack and casino in Hot Springs, Arkansas, United States. It is the home to "The Racing Festival of the South", a four-day series of races that concludes with the Arkansas Derby.
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Museum about organized crime in America, particularly during the prohibition years of the 1920s and early 1930s, when Chicago gangsters came to Hot Springs to relax in the thermal baths and run illegal drinking and prostitution establishments while local police and politicians were paid to forget they ever saw any gangsters.
Includes the Fordyce Bathhouse and seven other bathhouses all built in the early 20th century. The Row is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Aside from the Fordyce which serves as the park visitor center, the Buckstaff and the Quapaw are the only other operating bathhouses that are still in use as a spa. The other bathhouses are vacant but awaiting new uses.
The visitor center in the former Fordyce Bathhouse is also a 24-room museum offering self-guided tours. Considered the most elegant bathhouse when completed in 1915, it exhibits beautiful mosaic tile floors, marble, stained glass windows and ceilings, a gymnasium, and routine bathing equipment. The 15-minute orientation movie, Valley of Vapors, offers a brief history of the area. Taking the Baths is a 9-minute video showing the traditional bathing routine in the Hot Springs bathhouses. Rest rooms and water fountains are located in the basement. Other rooms shown include the music room, massage rooms and a bowling alley.
A landscaped walkway behind Bathhouse Row which offers a glimpse of the springs and historic landscape features. Entrances are from behind the Visitor Center and from Fountain Street.
The present Hale Bathhouse is the oldest visible structure on Bathhouse Row. The Mission Revival-style bathhouse is a textbook case of the changes in use and design of bathhouses buildings in Hot Springs National Park.