Walking under the magnolia trees along Bathhouse Row, I sometimes imagine Al Capone stepping out of a Packard for a little card game at the Southern Club. The notorious gangster was known to take his pleasure in this spa town in the green Ouachita Mountains. The Southern Club is now a wax museum with a faux Bill Clinton in the window, but all the bathhouses have been restored to their glory--though only one, the Buckstaff, is still in operation as a bathhouse. It attracts all sorts of people in need of loosening up.

Yes, Hot Springs has a long history of being a little more relaxed than the rest of Arkansas. Artists like that, and they like the natural scenery, and the affordable studio and housing rents, says author-artist Carole Katchen, who moved to the town of 36,000 from Los Angeles in 1995. 'We have a remarkable number of artists who support themselves through their art,' she says. 'And being in the South, it's a gracious lifestyle. People are friendlier.' Pat Scavo of the Blue Moon Gallery on Central Avenue counts some 20 artists who've arrived in Hot Springs from all over the country within the past two years.

The credit for spurring this renaissance goes to the Italian artist who goes by the single name Benini. Passing through Hot Springs in 1989, he noticed all the empty storefronts downtown and soon established a studio and gallery to display his colorful geometric paintings. He told his artist friends; they told theirs, and the rest is history.

Benini has moved away, but there are more than a dozen galleries within half a mile of Central Avenue, along with restaurants and performance venues. On the first Friday evening of each month, the Hot Springs Gallery Walk attracts a horde of art lovers, and the galleries hold receptions. At one of the more memorable ones this year, wildlife artist D. Arthur Wilson brought a Bengal tiger to Blue Moon Gallery. But even without tigers, Gallery Central, Taylor's Contemporanea, and the other art showcases are lively cultural refuges.