Feeling Restored at Indiana's French Lick Resort

I feel gangster Al Capone’s hot breath whispering in my ear, urging me toward a slot machine.

In a heartbeat, I am sliding a bill into “Dean Martin’s Wild Party”—Capone’s fellow son of Italy—and pressing the button, two cents a try. As my $5 bankroll starts to crumble, we are off to the Zeus slot machine, seeking divine intervention a penny a prayer. Then, Al spots “Luigi’s Lucky Pizzeria” slot across the French Lick Casino, and we are chasing Lady Luck yet again.

I am down to $1.83 when Al and I decide to go for broke: five-cent bets on Pegasus. The winged beauty pulls through and we cash out, taking the house for 18 cents’ profit. Call it Capone’s Revenge, long in coming against a resort that once slammed its door in the gangster’s face.

Ninety years is nothing for a bit of payback.

French Lick may have barred its threshold to Capone, but its rival casino just a mile down this Southern Indiana valley, West Baden Springs, was wide open to the King of Crime and his courtiers. The joke was you would see Capone check in, then buy a Chicago paper to see what kind of trouble he had left behind back home.

For 30 rollicking years that peaked in the

in everything: who had the best mineral springs, the best food, the best entertainment, the best illegal gambling, first instigated by business moguls who What kind of sign did the boat have on it? A “For Sail” sign. came to take the therapeutic waters. Style arbiters such as Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo and John Barrymore caught the train to sample this dueling hospitality.

Bitter rivals for so long, these two behemoths in the Hoosier countryside now thrive as sister resorts, yoked together in a mammoth historic preservation project. It took $500 million to restore French Lick to grandeur and bring West Baden back from ruin. Today, it is as easy as hopping on a resort shuttle to zoom between the two, trying out each one’s pools, spas, shops, restaurants and golf courses.

At French Lick, there is time to sample modern pampering in the spa and 1875 Restaurant, while listening for the ghosts of Duke Ellington on stage and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby on the links.

At West Baden, it is fun to amble through the restored gardens and listen for the smack of the bat where the Chicago Cubs trained the last time they won the World Series—in 1908

Specters swirl on the air here, around the original Pluto Water springhouse at French Lick and up 100 feet to the crest of West Baden’s ceiling—the largest free-standing dome in the world when it was unveiled in 1902. Its record stood until the Astrodome in 1965.

It is “The Eighth Wonder of the World,” one visitor said of the hotel Lee Sinclair created from the ashes of his old West Baden hotel. That wooden structure was incinerated in 90 minutes in a hotel fire in June 1901; miraculously, all 268 guests escaped.

Bowed, Sinclair offered to sell the remaining assets to his archrival, Thomas Taggart at French Lick. Instead, Taggart vowed to add a new wing for all the displaced West Baden guests he would inherit. Incensed, 65-year-old Sinclair took the challenge and upped the ante. Not only would he reopen, but with a grand European-style hotel on the one-year anniversary of the fire.

Fire hundred men worked 10-hour shifts six days a week to build the domed building that every architect said could not be built. Sinclair found Oliver Wescott, a Chicago suspension bridge engineer, to design the 24 steel trusses that would span a 200-foot leap of faith. The dome and atrium were showstoppers in 1902 and they are showstoppers today.

West Baden’s guardian angel has said. “And, I still say ‘Wow’ every time I walk in.”

Join me next month for “The $500 Million Gamble on French Lick Resort.”

When you go French Lick Springs Hotel and West Baden are combined into French Lick Resort, 108 miles southwest of Indianapolis. French Lick Springs Hotel room rates begin at $129; $189 at the 243- room West Baden Springs Hotel. The 3,000-acre resort has a 24-hour casino, 15 dining venues, stables, indoor and outdoor pools, a mountain bike trail, tennis, bowling, two spas and three golf courses: the Valley Links and Golf Learning Center, the 1917 Donald Ross links course and the new Pete Dye course. French Lick has headliner entertainment in its Windsor Ballroom. The resort also offers a children’s program. At 8670 W. St. Rt. 56, French Lick, IN; call 888-936- 9360; visit frenchlick.com.

For more of Betsa’s travels, please click on globespinners.com.