CAN an entire town moonlight?
Carved into the Ozark hills in Northwestern Arkansas, the citizens of Eureka Springs double up on a lot of their gigs.
The mayor runs Eureka’s best Mexican restaurant, Casa Colina, with her husband. Your waiter at the Crescent Hotel’s Crystal Dining Room is more than happy to show off his Louis Armstrong impersonation when he performs at Sunday brunch — the same impersonation that was cut from his appearance on the “The Gong Show.” And Wolf, a bartender at the Squid and the Whale pub, is one of the foremost Elvis experts in the state — or so it seemed to me after a few rounds, anyway.
Northwest Arkansas is the spiritual home of the big-box store –Bentonville, Wal-Mart HQ, is a scant 40 miles away. Politics (and aesthetics) aside, Wal-Mart aims to sell a little bit of everything in one place. Likewise, Eureka Springs has something that appeals to many different demographics: bikers, hippies, Passion Play devotees and health nuts all can stake a claim here.
For locals in this town of 2,200, moonlighting is a necessity.
A healthy embrace of anyone willing to pay is in the water here — literally. Originally a neutral site for the Indian tribes in the area, a local doctor discovered the healing properties of the springs during a hike with his son. After the Civil War, he started bottling it and selling it as a cure-all.
Soon, the town was flooded with visitors looking to sample the health benefits firsthand. A boom ensued. Eureka grew tenfold. Soon, several hotels sprang up, where people could relax as they took the cure — abetted by fresh air and exercise, which wasn’t on the menu in their polluted cities back home.
None of it was built to last, though. Many of the hotels, along with Eureka Springs downtown, were made of wood and burned in fires (that’s why so much of Eureka Springs is made of brick and stone today).
Others fell into the wrong hands. Before the Second World War, the Crescent Hotel was home to a cancer ward run by a con man without a medical credential to his name. Suffice it to say, his scheme is said to be the source of the ghosts in the Crescent, considered to be one of the most haunted hotels in America today.
Still, Eureka would not disappear from the map or the popular consciousness for long. In the 1960s, Jesus came to town. The 70-foot “Christ of the Ozarks” statue, visible from the balcony at the Crescent, looms over the trees outside surrounding Eureka Springs. He marks the site of the annual Passion play, telling the story of the Christ (sans Mel Gibson), now in its fourth decade.
The Greatest Story Ever Told had a good run, but these days, Jesus could use a fresh coat of paint and the play itself would benefit from some new special effects. The owners are trying to draw additional visitors with a paired exhibition on dinosaurs — which requires some creative cognitive dissonance in a biblical locale such as this — but that shouldn’t stifle anyone’s enjoyment.
Jesus was not the only longhair to arrive in Eureka Springs in the ’60s. Hippies, burned out on the San Francisco scene or simply broke and headed home, settled here around the same time. For the most part, their legacy is in the New Age-y vibe around town. Haight-Ashbury, it’s not, but in some ways, it’s as sweetly old-fashioned as the Passion play.
Today, Eureka Springs gets by on tourism from a sizeable gay population, straight couples getting married (the town ranks third in the US among marriage licenses issued) and the bikers who come to sample the winding roads of the Ozarks.
Sometimes their interests even overlap; witness the many gay couples on Harleys roaring through town. You never know what you’ll see.
It’s all funneled through Eureka’s main drag, snaking down the hill and doubling back on itself three times. Visitors walking uphill huff and puff while browsing the antique shops or fortifying themselves at bars like the Rowdy Beaver. Concrete alley staircases offer shortcuts between the tiers of the town.
Even those have history. The stairs by Jack’s Place, for example, are where the townspeople shot one of culprits from a botched bank robbery in the 1920s. Thanks to strict zoning, the look of Eureka Springs hasn’t changed much. Many of the Victorian-style homes here are dead ringers for the flying house in “Up,” even those built in the last ten or twenty years.
Right outside of downtown, the three-year-old Keels Creek winery doesn’t seem to fit with Arkansas history. But, it turns out, the state was third in the nation producing wine before prohibition.
Winery Keels Creek even utilizes some of those old-school grapes from that time in the wines it produces now. (A warning: some of the bottles are unapologetically called “deck wine” or “hot-tub wine” — i.e. drinking locales that aren’t for the more subtly flavored bottles). But many of their reds, like the Chambourcin, are dry, complex, and affordable.
Edwige Denyszyn, the Gallic half of the husband-and-wife team that owns the place, happily schools visitors on how hard it is to grow grapes in Arkansas — it’s amazing they were ever successful the first time around. Try as it might to be different than the rest of the state, Eureka Springs remains authentically Arkansan, right down to the water and the grapevines.
Eureka’s history is one of constant discovery and rediscovery by generations of visitors, all the way back to that first entrepreneurial doctor. The town’s name comes from the story of Archimedes theory of displacement, revealed to him when he stepped into a tub full of water. “Eureka!” he shouted, which roughly translates as “I have found it!”
The irony, of course, is just like Archimedes bath, Eureka Springs was here the whole time, waiting to be discovered anew.
THE LOWDOWN
GO: Eureka Springs is located 1 hr 30 minutes from Branson, Mo. and approximately three hours from both Tulsa and Little Rock. The nearest commercial airport is from the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport in Bentonville, about one hour from Eureka Springs (nwara.com).
MORE INFO:
eurekasprings.org