Maxine's Live

This 1895 building at 700 Central Avenue in Hot Springs served as a saloon and bordello before becoming the domain of Maxine Temple Jones, a former WAC veteran turned madam who ran the operation from 1950 until her arrest in 1963. Staff at the current music venue hear footsteps on the vacant second floor and feel watched near the staircase that once led to the bordello rooms.

Al Capone, Babe Ruth, Bugsy Siegel, and Lucky Luciano all walked through the same door at 700 Central Avenue in Hot Springs. Upstairs was not a bar. It was a bordello.

The building went up around 1895 as the Crystal Saloon, a legal drinking establishment on Hot Springs' main drag. But like most buildings on Central Avenue in the early 1900s, it had a second life on its second floor. The upstairs operated as the "Hot Springs Business Men's Social Club," a polite name for a brothel that catered to the city's steady stream of politicians, gangsters, and wealthy visitors who came for the thermal baths and stayed for everything else. Hot Springs in that era was an open city. Illegal gambling, bootlegging, and prostitution ran with the cooperation of local authorities. The town was a neutral zone for organized crime, a place where rival gangs could sit in the same room without shooting each other.

The woman who gave the building its current name was Maxine Temple Jones, born June 15, 1915, in Johnsville, Bradley County. She described herself as a tomboy, the daughter of a farmer and logging contractor named David Temple. She served in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps from 1943 to 1945, stationed at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. After the war she worked as a security guard at the Camden arsenal in Ouachita County.

In 1948, she landed in Hot Springs and found work in a brothel on Prospect Street. By 1950, she had bought the business for ,000 and made the jump from worker to madam. She expanded fast, purchasing a large home on Palm Street that became known as "The Mansion," where she entertained clients including local businessmen, doctors, state officials, congressmen, and prominent mobsters. In 1963, she was arrested and sentenced to two years at Cummins Prison. After her release in 1965, she bought the Central Avenue Hotel with a loan from a friend. She married three times, outlived all three husbands, received a full pardon from Governor Winthrop Rockefeller after providing information about illegal gambling, and in 1983 published her autobiography: Maxine, Call Me Madam.

She died on April 15, 1997, at Wagnon Place Nursing Home in Warren, Bradley County. She was 81. She was buried in Palestine Cemetery.

The building on Central Avenue got its renovation starting in 1989 and reopened as Maxine's on January 8, 1991. Today it is a music venue and bar with pizza, live bands, and walls covered with old photographs and artifacts from the building's various lives.

Staff have described hearing footsteps on the second floor when nobody is up there. Doors open and close on their own. A feeling of being watched follows people near the back staircase, the same one that once led to the bordello rooms. The Hot Springs Haunted Tours stop at the building and tell the bordello story as part of their walking route down Central Avenue, a stretch with multiple stops and verified paranormal claims.

The haunting at Maxine's is less documented than some Hot Springs locations. No formal investigation has been published. But the building absorbed a century of secrets in a city built on the premise that what happened here stayed here. Maxine ran her operation for over two decades, married three men who all died, survived prison, wrote a book naming names, and got a governor's pardon. If any personality was strong enough to stick to a building, hers qualifies.