Former Hot Springs poetry venue across from Bathhouse Row
514B Central Avenue (former), Hot Springs, AR
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Former poetry venue; building remains but not as the Poet's Loft
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved Central Avenue sidewalk
Equipment
Photos OK
The Poet's Loft operated at 514B Central Avenue in Hot Springs, Arkansas, across from Bathhouse Row. For more than a decade, Dr. Paul Tucker and Suzanne Tucker provided the space as a venue for the long-running Wednesday Night Poetry series, documented in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas as one of the longest continuously running poetry events in the United States.
The building sits within the Hot Springs Central Avenue Historic District, the commercial corridor preserved as part of Hot Springs National Park's federal-protected core. The Poet's Loft itself is no longer operating at the address; the Wednesday Night Poetry series moved venues over the years.
The address fronts the historic Bathhouse Row corridor, a remarkable cluster of preserved bathhouse architecture managed by the National Park Service.
Sources
A single first-person account, attributed to a former Poet's Loft worker, describes a Wednesday afternoon before a regular poetry reading. The narrator was awake on a couch with limited vision, saw what appeared to be a friend walk into the kitchen, and felt a pair of female hands grip and hold her down to the couch. The man in the chair across the room reported having seen no one else in the room and confirmed the kitchen was empty when she called out.
The next day, the narrator's friend reportedly confirmed she had been elsewhere — but in the exact clothes the narrator had seen in the kitchen. The account is the only specific incident documented in the Shadowlands entry and is not corroborated by other published reports.
Walk Central Avenue across from Bathhouse Row, where the Poet's Loft hosted Wednesday Night Poetry for more than a decade. The poetry venue is no longer at the location; the address sits within the Hot Springs Central Avenue Historic District, an excellent self-guided stroll past the National Park Service's preserved bathhouses.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
New Haven, CT
Vanderbilt Hall is a U-shaped Tudor-Gothic dormitory at the southeast corner of Yale's Old Campus, designed by Charles C. Haight and completed in 1894. It was the gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt II to memorialize his son William H. Vanderbilt II (1870-1892), who contracted typhoid fever during a tour of the western United States and died during his junior year at Yale.
Los Angeles, CA
Venice Beach is a coastal neighborhood of Los Angeles developed in 1905 by tobacco millionaire Abbot Kinney as a planned canal community modeled on Venice, Italy. The Venice Boardwalk and adjacent buildings served as a frequent shooting location for silent comedies in the 1910s, including Charlie Chaplin's 1915 Keystone short By the Sea, which was filmed along the Venice Beach piers and boardwalk.
Marquette, MI
The building at 113 South Front Street in Marquette was built in 1886 as 'H. R. Oates Furniture / Undertaking,' a combined furniture-store-and-funeral-home — a common nineteenth-century commercial pairing because the same craftsmen built coffins and parlor furniture. The cellar served as embalming and winter-storage space for bodies awaiting spring burial. After the Oates business folded in the 1930s, the building operated as the Shamrock Bar from 1945 until being sold in 2007; it now houses Elizabeth's Chophouse.