Last month I cried when I read  Frances Anderton DNA newsletter and heard her report on KCRW that plans were brewing which would destroy one of Los Angeles’ most beloved Koreatown cultural icons; Beverly Hot Springs.  These hot springs, discovered 120 years ago and the spa, one of the first Korean Spas in Los Angeles, have been serving Koreatown, tourists and Angelenos from across the city for 40 years.   The thought of losing BHS, as my family calls it, left me distraught.  As a lover of LA history, geology and a long patron of Beverly Hot Springs, I understood in my tired bones that if these plans went through it would be a tragic blow to Los Angeles.  I am not alone in my fears. 

Many patrons were disturbed by the news and wondered how this one-of-a-kind cultural treasure was being jettisoned without anyone in city leadership asking for proper assessment of  its very unique history and impossible to replace value.  The developer’s  Oxford Avenue Project at 101 apartments and seven stories, many argued was oversized. Additionally, the project in a mixed use zone did not include the spa in their design.  Instead their plans were to cap the pipe and call it a day.  This was stunning because the waters in the spa are from the only natural hot spring in Los Angeles and as my friend Teresa said, “This is like covering up the tar pits with a big box apartment building.  No other city has the Tar Pits and no other city has Beverly Hot Springs.”    The hot springs and the spa are part of the bigger, richer story of Los Angeles that starts where a lot of LA tales begin, Edward Doheny.  

In the fall of 1892, Edward Doheny & Charles Canfield, bought land at what is now Glendale Blvd and Colton Street in the hills of south Echo Park.  After digging several months, Doheny hit asphalt at 200 feet, from which oil could be extracted.  That oil well, now ironically  under an asphalt parking lot, would change Los Angeles’ fate.  Before film and before aviation, oil was the monster commercial industry of LA.

Doheny’s dig was not the first oil well in the county but it was the first in the city.  It was also not unexpected because of the nearby tar pits in Rancho La Brea.  If Los Angeles still had tinges of sleepiness as a 19th century big-ish town, oil (and thirsty autos in the nation) rocketed Los Angeles into a 20th century muscular megalopolis. Doheny’s drilling sparked mass speculation. Front yards, back yards and empty lots were a timberland of derricks west of downtown.   Everyone wanted to make money.  However, some oil catters did not hit the coveted black ooze, they hit something else.  Hot water.  This is when the story gets interesting. 

 

After Doheny’s discovery, a prospector, believed to be African American and who lived in the neighborhood, drilled up hot water near present day Beverly and Vermont.  We don’t know his name and we don’t  know how he may have been cut out of the LA power structure by racism but he sold the land to a dentist, Dr. Edwards, who was a white man with a big plan. 

Edwards’ vision was to use the steamy mineral water for a large plunge and on December 31, 1902, he opened Bimini Baths.   At that time, the huge private elegant pool house, nestled against the gentle bluff (soon to be a graded Vermont Avenue) was set in a natural ravine of eucalyptus trees and a slough all part of a marsh and stream system that extended to Wilshire.  Sacatela/Bimini stream was eventually covered, the marsh drained and later housing developed on the land.  For those who wonder why there is a big dip in the roads on Beverly and Temple between Vermont and Virgil, you are driving in the ravine, crossing the creek and slough that once was the rustic backdrop for this major health resort.   (For excellent research about Sacatela/Bimini Creek check out Joe Linton’s piece on CreekFreak and the Militant Angeleno ) 

In this bucolic terrain, Dr. Edwards’ bathhouse was modeled after health spas in beautiful European settings.  Bimini Baths thrilled Victorian Los Angeles residents who packed their swimsuits and took the street car to the western edge of the city for a plunge in the natural hot pool.  After a fire in 1905 destroyed the bath house, Edwards rebuilt with more pools, dressing rooms and a hotel across the street which served both the local and international tourists.  Bimini Baths was beloved in the community for five decades. Today you can still find older Angelenos who speak of their joyful memories learning to swim at the Bimini pools.   But like so much of Los Angeles history, where there is beauty there is also ugly.  

Bimini Baths was not open to everyone.  Non white people were banned from the pools.  A Latino neighbor recalled years later, that he and his friends were relegated to the last day before the water was changed as it was “too dirty for white patrons”.  In the mid 40s, African Americans fighting for equity, filed lawsuits and protested the white only policy.  In one article it was reported that the pool manager refused entry to the group because he believed them to be “Communists and trouble makers.”  In 1948 Bimini Bath lost a final lawsuit forcing them to desegregate the pools.  No elected official rallied to keep Bimini hot mineral pools open and desegregated. Not one. Instead Bimini Baths declared bankruptcy (1951). Imagine if the city had purchased the property and left the marsh lands open and turned the surroundings into a park highlighted by the natural waters of Bimini Baths.   This would have been a treasured asset in the community and city.   Instead, civic leaders lacked vision, courage and creativity to be on the right side of history in 1948.   Let’s put a pin in that note.  

Around 1900, one mile west of Bimini (near Western) and also off Beverly, in a wheat field, another wildcatter drilled and he also hit hot water.  The pipe was capped, the speculator moved on until 1909, W Herbert Allen, developer of the Allandale housing tract, sold two Oxford street lots to Richard Grant.  Grant took one lot for his home and as explained by his grandson in a 1972 interview in the LA Times, he offered up the hot water for free to his neighbors until the city’s piped water arrived in 1915.   It is quite extraordinary, given all the developers who marched through Los Angeles, that this lot remained empty for eight decades with only the ‘mineral water storage’ shed (as identified by Sanborn Insurance)on the land.   

Then in 1984 a Korean American family, which included a doctor of Oriental Medicine and a Korean Olympic athlete, who had visions of building a medical and health spa like those in Korea heard about the hot water.  The couple bought the Grant lots and built Beverly Hot Springs.  While there are many spas in Koreatown, few (if any) have this pedigreed background and none have the mineral water.  Right from the start it was clear Beverly Hot Springs was going to be special.   

Protective Buddhist Stone Lions (Fu/Foo Dogs) welcome guests as they enter the spa and Korean art and themes are throughout the facility.  On the ground level is the women’s section and on the second floor is the men’s spa.  There are wet rooms for Korean body scrub and body care treatments and facilities for massages and facials.   But what separates Beverly Hot Springs from any other spa is the water.  The hot water flows from a pipe plumbed to a depth of 2200 feet. When the tap is wide, the water comes out at 175 gallons per minute and at almost constant temperature varying 96 – 105 degrees.  The results of a lab test showed that the water is mineral rich and completely negative of bacterial content. 

The authenticity of this natural hot water was something I personally witnessed through smell.  In early 1994, I went to the spa and noticed that the smell of sulfur was stronger than usual.   One week later the Northridge earthquake hit.  About a year and half later I read an article that Japanese geologists reported a change in sulfur before the Kobe quake. I thought of my experience at Beverly Hot Springs.   Then a few years ago, I had the same experience when I smelled a change in sulfur and later that night there was a 3.2 earthquake in Hollywood Hills.  After that experience I had a conversation with a geologist at CalTech and suggested they forge a relationship with Beverly Hot Springs for early earthquake warnings and I threw out,  “Don’t you guys need massages anyway?”  

As for the experience of the waters. The therapeutic nature of the water is understood as soon as you slide your body into the hot pool.  Aches and pains melt.  Big city stress and tensions disappear in the mineral rich water.  The body is replenished. Many people with physical ailments attest to improvements in their bodies, some have said doctors recommend BHS as part of their health regiment.  But there is also healing beyond the physical state. It is something more.  After all, it is hard to have any pretense when you and everyone else around you is naked. Being able to let down one’s guard in a very public manner is a healing response to the kevlar wrapped psyche that plague most Angelenos living our big city life.  Adding to the experience is that unlike Bimini Baths, the patrons are all demographics.  Asian, White, African American and  Latino.  Old, young, all financial strata, including elderly on fixed income, it’s a grand mix up and everyone feels welcomed at Beverly Hot Springs.  I often see families, mothers with daughters and many grandmas in the spa.  I brought my elderly mother and her friend. Both could not stop talking about the wonderful experience for the rest of their visit to town.  BHS differs from fancy spas in LA because of its relaxed environment and staffers who are void of haughty airs. It is also appealing to tourists and of course celebrities. 

There is also another type of healing at Beverly Hot Springs that can calm the soul.  After the civil unrest of 1992, the news was loaded with stories of animus splintering Korean and African American communities in Los Angeles.  I was grateful for my trips to Beverly Hot Springs, where there is zero racial tension among any group.  While the news may lean into anger. In BHS my heart is hopeful that our city can find its way through any period of racial tension. 

We’re vulnerable in the pools and authentic and real.  There is a level of safety in this magical space. I shared pools with women who had mastectomies and observed women going up to them in the dressing room talking about their own cancer battles.  There is one regular patron, a young woman who is confined to a wheelchair and has speech difficulties.  When she is carried into the pool by her caretaker with such love, it is almost as holy a moment as you would find in Lourdes, France.  But the reality is she is just a young woman with a disability enjoying the gift that is this remarkable spa in our large city.   

My own relationship with the spa began in 1989.  I was single, living in West Hollywood and working in TV production, where a day on a set can strip a person of their will to live.  From my very first trip to Beverly Hot Springs in Koreatown, I knew it was no ordinary spa.  Later I introduced BHS to my husband and then our son after he reached the minimum age requirement.   When our small family is exhausted by a weekend of doing too much, a trip to BHS on a late Sunday afternoon dissolves fatigue and tension and is followed by a cozy meal at home where we have a non rushed, authentic reconnection.   

These rich experiences for me and others is why the thought of losing Beverly Hot Springs left us all bereft.  

The family who owns Beverly Hot Springs is selling it.   After forty years, they deserve to retire and receive their desired rate for the sale. The real estate listing has all the details about the spa.  It is clear the owner was hoping whoever bought the property would continue the spa.  

This shallow destructive pattern of arguably soulless opportunism by developers is all over Los Angeles. If you take a trip to Hollywood, Mid City and every spot in between you will find a plethora of big box apartments.  To be clear, I am not anti-apartment, we only bought our condo ten years ago.  Unless I live to 110 years I will have spent most of my adult life as a renter.  I respect the need for housing, especially affordable housing, but the lack of incorporating this beautiful resource and cultural heritage into the plans speaks to a pattern in Los Angeles of forces wanting what forces want and not letting anything get in the way of their desires.  Unless of course, the community comes out swinging.     

In late spring, word got out among loyal patrons that the Oxford Street Project was working its way through the city development process.  Whispers in dressing rooms, conversations in the parking lot, phone numbers exchanged, rapid fire texts and emails shot across the city.  Like a story out of Roman mythology, warriors were being forged not out of fire but instead out of magical waters in Koreatown.   The Beverly Hot Springs Alliance was formed, a lawyer hired and an appeal was made.  It was clear “namaste” had turned into “en gard.”   

The Alliance stepped up the battle as the September land use meeting approached.  Several in the group went to a local neighborhood council meeting and made the case with the city council member to take on the cause.  He was resistant.  Fortunately, two days later, the developers pulled out of the project.   While this news is welcomed by those who care about Beverly Hot Springs, it is a temporary reprieve.   We understand that we must do all we can now to protect the springs.  Much of that will come through the work for a historic preservation designation and community activism.  We also will need to exert pressure on elected officials who hide behind the process and shrug their shoulders with,  “Sorry, there is nothing I can do.”   This is hogwash.  

Consider if this building or any project in LA was going to house the national KKK headquarters.     Rightfully, every elected person in LA would figure a way to stop it.   And it would get stopped.  You know it, I know it, we all know it.   The real issue is that when something being lost is cultural, and more nuanced, kinder &  gentler, we still need to find the righteous fight and not suffer a vacuum of leadership and lack of creative solutions.  

Let’s stand up for the gentleness that comes with a 120 year old legacy and a 40 year old cultural icon in Los Angeles.   Circling to the pin from earlier:  Remember no Los Angeles elected official did the right thing in 1948 at Bimini Baths.    Let’s all do the right thing in 2023.  

Here are the steps to protect Beverly Hot Springs. 

Step 1 

Sign Beverly Hot Springs Alliance Petition  then amplify this petition. Get the word out.  

Step 2

Unfortunately because too many laws in Los Angeles favor developers’ goals, an attorney was needed to file an appeal on the multiple issues with this project. While this Oxford Ave project is now dead the likelihood is great that a new developer will come in again with similar misguided goals in addition we anticipate costs as we seek historical preservation.  Please donate any amount ( it is all good) to Save Beverly Hot Springs GO FUND ME         

Step 3

Amplify this story.  Reach out to your friends and family, post on your social media page, share it like crazy.  If you are a member of the media or know someone in the media please get this story out there.  Beverly Hot Springs unique history and cultural significance deserves full press coverage.   

Step 4

Come to Beverly Hot Springs.  Bring a friend or family member.  Take the waters, get replenished, do it to remind yourself why this fight is important and also because you probably need it.  It’s hard living in the city.  Get replenished.   

Final note 

There is so much broken in Los Angeles that one can be forgiven if they feel “What’s the Use? It’s all going to hell anyway.”  Not going to lie, I sometimes feel it, too.  But I cannot stay in that headspace too long because it leads to civic cynicism and if too many go there then that leads to a world none of us want to live in.   Please do these 4 steps and let’s fix a little piece of Los Angeles together and protect our rich history.       

Tracy Abbott Cook