A crazy quilt is made up of pieces arranged without pattern or order. Eureka Springs is like that. It is an architectural labyrinth unique among cities. The recently built annex of the Penn Memorial Baptist Church has a home for the minister on the third floor. You may enter at the street-level door on Mountain Street, walk through the rooms—a distance of about forty feet—and look down upon Owen Street, thirty feet below. This sounds like an architectural fairy tale, but it is true. Houses are built like that in this Switzerland of America. In many homes the street entrance is on the second or third floor, or the house may be reached by a stairway clinging to the mountain side. One business house is surrounded by streets like a moat ’round a castle and it has four street addresses each on a different level. In the early days when the town was thronged with health seekers who wanted homes near the springs, terraces were built and hemmed-in with massive stone walls. Houses were constructed on these terraces with stairways leading from one level to the other. Frequently a natural cave opens at the backdoor. The yards and gardens have the appearance of “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” built by Nebuchadnezzar for his hill-loving queen. Some residents may step from their gardens to the roof of the house while others must climb stairways to their patch of vegetables.

The first lawsuit in Eureka Springs, according to the old-timers, was caused by a woman who lived in one of these terraced homesites. She carelessly threw dishwater out of the backdoor and down a neighbor’s chimney, damaging the furniture.

Vance Randolph tells about a drunken farmer who was found in the streets of the town one Saturday night. The pavement is not level by any means and the poor farmer was walking with one foot on the sidewalk and one in the gutter. A woman came along and the fellow called on her for help. “You’re just drunk,” she told him. “Is that it?” he said, much relieved, “My gosh, I thought maybe I was crippled.”

Eureka Springs is laid out with 238 named streets with no direct cross intersections. (One or two right-angle crossings have been found since Ripley featured this item in his “Believe It or Not.”) On the map the streets look like a bewildered maze with the letters U and V formed fifty-one times, the letter S thirteen times, O, seven times, and perhaps other alphabetical curiosities in this labyrinth of streets. There are five street levels on West Mountain from Main Street in the valley to the Crescent Hotel on Prospect Avenue.

Many exaggerated tales have been told about this “crazy quilt” town. There is the fellow, for instance, who doesn’t need a picture window in his house to observe the scenery. He merely looks up the chimney and watches his neighbor drive the cows home from the pasture. And don’t forget the well digger who was digging a well on East Mountain. When down about forty feet the bottom of the well fell out and he landed (on his feet) right in the middle of Main Street. They had to change their plans and dig the well up instead of down in order to strike water.

Eureka Springs has only two business thoroughfares, Main Street in the valley from Planer Hill to the railroad station, and Spring Street which branches off of Main at the City Auditorium and winds around the mountain to the Crescent Hotel. Once, in the early days, a feud developed among the merchants on Main (then called Mud Street) and they built a high board fence right down the middle of the street. This made the traffic lanes so narrow that a wagon could barely squeeze through. The fence was soon removed by order of the city authorities. Spring Street is lined with flowing springs—Sweet, Harding, Congress, Crescent, Grotto, and Dairy on the Harmon Playgrounds, once the site of the old auditorium. This street was engineered by Governor Powell Clayton (they always called him “governor”) who helped dress up the town in the early eighties. Sweet spring was “moved” from the hollow behind the post office to its present location on the Spring Street level.

In addition to the street layouts, other believe it or nots in the city are the Basin Park Hotel, “eight floors and every floor a ground floor,” the St. Elizabeth’s Church, “entered through the steeple,” and Pivot Rock, sixteen inches in diameter at the base and thirty-two feet across at the top. The hotel stands against the side of the mountain with its street level door on Spring. It is bridged from the rear to paths on the mountain side at four different levels. The “steeple” of the church is in reality a detached bell-tower. It is on the Crescent Grade level and steps lead down to the church which is set on a terrace held in place by a twenty-foot wall. A rock can be tossed from this terrace to the roof of the Carnegie Library about one hundred feet below on another street. The travel distance between the two locations is about one-fourth mile.

The numerous stairways of wood and stone, connecting street levels, have given rise to the name, “Stairstep Town.” Cora Pinkley Call used this title for her book on Eureka Springs, published in 1953. Some of the leading stairways are: Jacob’s Ladder, Sweet Springs, Magnetic Spring Skyway, and the “upway” from Spring Street to Eureka Street. Jacob’s Ladder is a series of wooden steps up East Mountain from the Main Street level to the Skydoor residential district on the mountain side. Rest stops are provided along the way in the form of seats where the old may rest and the young, perchance, do a little courting. The Sweet Spring steps are of stone and they lead from the spring, through the tree tops, to the terminus of two streets three hundred yards above. The Magnetic Spring stairway is at the junction of Main street with Magnetic Drive, reaching up to Hillside (Depot Grade). These steps are now covered with moss and seldom used. It was once a popular walk-way from the Sanitarium on the hill to Magnetic Spring. The winding “up way” from the foot of Mountain Street at the Baptist Church is a short cut to a private home called Mount Air. Taking this stairway reminds us of the tourist who asked a native Ozarker if he was on the right road to Springfield. “Well, not exactly,” he replied, “This road just moseys along for a spell, then it turns into a pig trail, then a squirrel track, and finally runs up a tree and ends in a knot-hole.” If you take this stairway and path to the upper street, turn to the left and follow the path around the mountain, you end up at the rear entrance to the fourth floor of the Basin Park Hotel.

Airplane View of the City