HOT SPRINGS, Ark.—The National Park Service is hoping that the newly renovated Quapaw bathhouse will stir up interest in restoring other Central Avenue bathhouses, which have sat unused for years.

The National Park Service is again offering leases for the Superior, Hale and Maurice bathhouses. The three were offered up for lease last November, but nothing came of it, said Hot Springs National Park Superintendent Josie Fernandez.

“We had no responses,” Fernandez told The Sentinel-Record. “We had a lot of people coming and looking.”

Fernandez says the bathhouses drew no investors last time, perhaps because of a slowing economy.

“The economic factors affecting so many people in so many areas may have had something to do with the lack of responses,” she said.

But Fernandez hopes the renovation of the Quapaw bathhouse will attract other potential investors.

“That on its own is going to be creating a buzz about Bathhouse Row ... serving as a vehicle to market the remaining few bathhouses,” Fernandez said.

The latest request for proposals will be open until Sept. 30, Fernandez said.

The Quapaw is the largest of eight bathhouses on Bathhouse Row that figured prominently in the popularity of Hot Springs as a resort town in the first half of the 1900s. Only one, the Buckstaff, is currently operating as a bathhouse. Another, the Fordyce, is used as the Hot Springs National Park visitor center.

The Quapaw was built in 1922, and it closed in 1984.

Fernandez also said the Park Service is close to signing a lease with The Museum of Contemporary Art-Hot Springs for the Ozark Bath House.