Hotel Hale offers lodging inside Hot Springs National Park/David and Kay Scott
Most of America’s national park lodges including Old Faithful Inn, El Tovar, Ahwahnee, Jackson Lake Lodge and Many Glacier Hotel were constructed as park lodges. Others were built to serve another purpose and later converted to national park lodges.
Kettle Falls Hotel in Voyageurs National Park was constructed in 1913 to house lumberjacks, dam builders and fishermen. The Inn at Brandywine Falls in Cuyahoga National Park, the only bed-and-breakfast in a national park, was built in 1848 as a farmhouse. The building that now houses the Argonaut Hotel in San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park originally served as a warehouse for a fruit and vegetable canning factory. Across the Golden Gate Strait from San Francisco, Cavallo Point is an upscale national park lodging facility in what was once an early 1900s U.S. Army fort.
A relatively new entry in the latter category of adaptive rehabilitation is Hotel Hale in Hot Springs, Arkansas, that opened in May 2019. Constructed in 1892, the building has 12,000 square feet on two floors and is the oldest of eight remaining historic structures along Hot Springs National Park’s Bathhouse Row. Two of buildings continue as active bathhouses while one former bathhouse is now operated as a microbrewery and restaurant. One serves as the national park visitor center and museum and another offers interactive educational experiences. Maurice bathhouse, with three floors and 23,000 square feet, has remained vacant since closing in 1974.
Entrepreneurs Pat and Ellen McCabe signed a lease in 2017 and spent considerable time and money converting Hale bathhouse into a boutique hotel. As with other national park lodges, the building is owned by the National Park Service while the business operation is managed by a private party, in this case the McCabes. Unlike most park lodges that are operated under 10-year contracts requiring management to remit a percentage of gross revenues to the park, Hotel Hale is managed under a 55-year lease with agreed upon monthly payments subject to annual inflation adjustments, plus a possible market value evaluation each decade.
The Maurice, one of nine rooms inside Hotel Hale/David and Kay Scott
Basically, the 55-year lease confers nearly all of the rights and expenses of ownership to the operator, who is required to pay for the building’s upkeep. The McCabes are responsible for roof leaks, oven breakdowns, broken windows, and virtually everything else that needs fixing or replacing. Unlike most park lodges, the operators are not required to seek approval for guest room rates and food prices. Hotel Hale is, like Yellowstone’s Old Faithful Inn and Yosemite’s Ahwahnee, a true national park lodge, although with considerably different financial and operating arrangements.
Pat and Ellen McCabe moved to Hot Springs in 1985, when Pat began work in hospital management at a regional medical center while Ellen specialized in food service. Prior to retirement the couple decided they wanted to remain in Arkansas with the thought of opening a business in downtown Hot Springs. Unable to locate anything promising on the city side of Central Avenue, their real estate agent pitched an unusual opportunity in the national park on the opposite side of the street: Hale Bathhouse that had remained vacant for most of the 40 years since its closing in 1978. The result was the successful adaptive rehabilitation of a historic building that had long been a part of the social fabric of Hot Springs. In addition to heading up a hospital and managing the hotel, Pat McCabe has served as the Hot Springs mayor for nearly a decade.
The first floor of Hotel Hale includes the registration desk, office, kitchen, a small bakery and a restaurant with a garden “living” wall under a large skylight that once offered sunlight for the bathhouse bathing hall. The second floor was essentially gutted and converted into nine guest rooms, each named for one of the town’s historic bathhouses. Individual guest rooms each have a soaking tub with access to the area’s famed geothermal spring mineral water. Breakfast comes with guest rooms that rent for $235 to $437 per night. The restaurant is open to the public Thursday through Tuesday. Additional dining is available in several nearby restaurants, including the Ohio Club across the street that was once frequented by Al Capone, Bugsy Segel, and Lucky Luciano.
Next door to Hotel Hale is Superior Bathhouse, home to the only brewery in a national park. It is also the world’s only brewery to use thermal spring water in the brewing process. For additional information about Hotel Hale visit www.hotelhale.com.
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