Maxine's Live

Now a bar and live music venue, the second floor of this Central Avenue building was once home to Maxine Temple Jones' famous bordello, the most notorious brothel in Hot Springs.

The building at 700 Central Avenue in Hot Springs, Arkansas stands near the heart of Bathhouse Row, a relic of the era when America's first resort city ran on a simple formula: gambling, girls, and whiskey. Constructed circa 1895 as the Crystal Saloon, the McLaughlin Building is a contributing structure to the Central Avenue Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. Like many establishments along this infamous strip, the ground floor maintained a veneer of respectability while the second floor housed something else entirely. By the early 1900s, the upstairs operated as the Hot Springs Business Men's Social Club -- a transparent cover for a bordello that catered to the politicians, businessmen, and gangsters who flocked to the Spa City's mineral baths and vice economy.

The woman who gave the building its lasting name arrived in 1948. Dora Maxine Temple Jones was born June 15, 1915, in Johnsville, Bradley County, Arkansas, the self-described tomboy daughter of a farmer and logging contractor. After graduating high school, she moved to Paris, Texas, where a department store coworker introduced her to sex work as supplemental income. She apprenticed under Nell Raborn, who ran a large brothel in Texarkana, learning the business from the inside. When World War II broke out, she married soldier Eugene Harris in 1943 and enlisted in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, serving at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. for two years. After her discharge, she worked as a security guard at the Camden arsenal before returning to Raborn's operation.

In 1948, Maxine relocated to Hot Springs and purchased the Central Avenue bordello in 1950 for a mere one thousand dollars. She quickly became the most successful madam in Arkansas, clearing an estimated five thousand dollars per night. Her success enabled her to purchase a fourteen-room, two-story home on Palm Street for fifteen thousand dollars, transforming it into "The Mansion" -- the most elegant and exclusive brothel the state had ever seen. Her clientele included federal judges, the state's attorney general, well-known members of Congress, and organized crime figures from both coasts. Local law enforcement collected commissions from madams in exchange for protection; in one memorable incident, a part-time preacher and deputy sheriff requested two hundred dollars from Maxine toward a church cross, which she supplied without hesitation.

The empire crumbled in 1963 when Maxine was arrested and convicted on prostitution charges, serving time at Cummins Penitentiary. Upon release in 1965, she provided information about illegal gambling operations in Hot Springs to federal authorities and received a full pardon from Governor Winthrop Rockefeller. She married career criminal Edward Jones in 1968 -- he died in 1971 -- and in 1983 published her autobiography, Maxine "Call Me Madam": The Life and Times of a Hot Springs Madam. The original manuscript identified hundreds of customers and corrupt officials by name, but her publisher persuaded her to use pseudonyms to avoid litigation. Maxine Temple Jones died on April 15, 1997, at age eighty-one in a nursing home in Warren, Bradley County.

The building on Central Avenue passed through various incarnations after Maxine's departure, including Sidney's Shoe Store in the late 1960s. Renovation began in 1989, and Maxine's opened for business on January 8, 1991, preserving the late nineteenth-century architectural character while embracing the building's colorful past. Today it operates as Maxine's Live, a bar, restaurant, and live music venue.

But staff and visitors say the building's former occupants never entirely left. The spirits of the women who worked on the second floor during the bordello years are said to linger in the space where they once entertained Hot Springs' most powerful men. Employees have reported cold spots that materialize without explanation, particularly on the second floor and along the staircase that once led clients from the legitimate ground-floor business to the illicit rooms above. The scent of perfume from another era -- heavy, floral fragrances unlike anything sold today -- drifts through the upstairs rooms when no living source can be found. A woman in vintage dress has been glimpsed from the corner of visitors' eyes, standing in doorways or near windows on the second floor before vanishing when looked at directly. Whether the spirit is Maxine herself, watching over the establishment that bears her name, or one of the working women who passed through these rooms during Hot Springs' wide-open decades, no one has determined. The building sits along the route of the Hot Springs Haunted Tours, which winds through the city's most notorious paranormal sites at 430 Central Avenue, weaving together the Spa City's intertwined histories of healing waters and moral compromise.