City of Hot Springs needs to work to keep historic Arlington open
By Roy Ockert Jr.
Arkansas’ largest hotel is in danger of being closed, and its new owner claims that special interests are behind a Hot Springs city government effort to sabotage his efforts to restore the hotel.
The Arlington Hotel’s origins can be traced back to 1875, but its original 100-room building was razed in 1893 to clear space for a 300-room hotel. That one was destroyed by fire in 1923, and the current building went up across Fountain Street. The original site, at the north end of Bathhouse Row, is now known as Arlington Park.
By the 1930s the Arlington Hotel and Spa had become a Hot Springs landmark, nestled at the foot of Hot Springs Mountain. It has 478 rooms and a 45,000-square-foot convention center.
The centerpiece of the Arlington has always been its grand Crystal Ballroom, which includes a dining room, dance floor, bar, and now a Starbucks. A mezzanine overlooking the ballroom leads to the convention center.
At one time the Arlington attracted national and international conventions, as well as the larger state gatherings — and it had no other competition in Arkansas, indeed little in the South.
Alas, the once elegant hotel has fallen on hard times. On Aug. 10 Hot Springs Chief Building Inspector Mike Scott set a Nov. 8 deadline for bringing the hotel into compliance with various safety standards or be closed down. Scott also ordered 47 rooms closed until safety violations identified in a Aug. 8 inspection could be corrected.
Oddly, the next day the 47 rooms passed a new inspection. Other safety problems involved in the Nov. 8 shutdown threat remain to be corrected.
This confrontation between city officials and the Arlington seems strange, especially in view of the bad publicity the city has received since the nearby Majestic Hotel, also a historic building, burned in February 2014. That hotel had been closed, but the city was blamed first for allowing the building to become a fire hazard, then for failing to get the site cleaned up.
The Arlington had been owned and operated by Southwest Hotels Inc. of Little Rock since 1954, but it was sold to Sky Capital Group LLC, also of Little Rock, and two San Antonio-based companies in early July. The purchase price for the hotel property, an adjacent building and four parking lot parcels was just over $5 million.
At the time Al Rajabi, chief executive officer for Sky Capital, pledged that his company would make significant renovations to the hotel and “to maintain it as one of the great American grand hotels.”
Within a month, though, the City of Hot Springs was setting deadlines to correct fire code violations and other safety hazards. The former were noted in an August inspection that served as a followup to an April inspection. Other violations had been cited in a June 2016 report. Why then were no deadlines set until after the sale?
In a letter posted on the Arlington’s Facebook page last week, Rajabi said that “people who have special interests behind them ... are putting up resistance.” He said he was close to signing a contract for renovations that would correct the problems and complained that city directors had refused to meet with him. None have offered support and guidance for saving a “historic icon,” he said.
The Arlington certainly is an icon that could again be an asset for Hot Springs and Arkansas, and city officials ought to be doing everything they can to work with Sky Capital to restore the hotel to safe operating conditions. Instead the city manager is threatening to go to court to get a copy of an engineering report commissioned by the hotel.
The hotel didn’t reach its present condition over just the past month. Its facilities and services have been deteriorating for years, and that’s hardly the fault of the new owners. Many organizations, including the Arkansas Press Association, of which I’m a past president, have stopped bringing conventions to the Arlington. In years past the APA always held one of its two annual conventions there. In fact, the first one I attended back in the 1960s was at the Arlington.
As a Hot Springs native, I have a special affinity for the hotel. My mom and dad met at the old Army-Navy Hospital — at the other end of Bathhouse Row — and I was born at what was then St. Joseph’s Hospital, another landmark building just up the street from the Arlington.
After I went to work at the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record as a high school senior, I had many occasions to spend time at the Arlington. First I was sent there daily to retrieve stock market reports from a Dow Jones ticker in the basement.
During my last summer there, while an Arkansas State College student, I was given the convention beat. That meant covering whatever was going on at the Arlington, and there was something almost every day. The state and national conventions drew keynote speakers like then-Vice President Richard Nixon and Chief Justice Earl Warren
In that summer of 1965 I was assigned to cover the Arkansas Bar Association convention keynote, to be given by Adlai Stevenson II, twice a candidate for president. I was invited to join his party for a stroll down Central Avenue, including a tour of the Superior Bathhouse, where he got overheated and had to return to his room.
A little over a month later Stevenson died of a heart attack in London.
Hot Springs has too much history in the Arlington than to let it follow the Majestic into oblivion.
Roy Ockert, a resident of Jonesboro, is a retired editor of The Jonesboro Sun. He can be reached at royo@suddenlink.net.