Crescent Bathhouse / The Chimes

The Crescent Bath House is located on Graham Avenue at Spring Street was built in 1887 and was designed by Frank Ferris in the Moorish style popular in the Victorian era. In the bathhouse venture, Ferris was the partner of Franklin Heald, one of Elsinore, California’s three founders. The bound register of 1888 and 1889, today in the family of Franklin Heald’s brother reads, “Crescent Bath House, Ferris and Heald, Props”. Heald, a city founder, built the bathhouse the year before Elsinore became a city. The bathhouse building has a proud heritage with reports of Indians bathing in a one-hundred-fourteen degree “hot medicine” before the settlers moved West. The spring water was also used to cure sick animals of a variety of diseases.  

After the discovery of Elsinore, Heald’s advertising made the city a prominent health resort and the bathhouse was purchased by a series of owners and was last used as a spa in 1945, operating as a rooming house until the late Bonnie Gaugh named it “The Chimes”, using it for interior decorating service and Victorian and Early American Antiques. 

In subdividing Rancho La Laguna for colonizing, Heald and his co-founders, Donald Graham and William Collier, had in late 1883 chosen the property surrounding the continuously flowing hot mineral water spring for the town site. The developers immediately advertised in Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Eastern newspapers that hot mineral water coming from the ground at one-hundred-ten degrees was available. Then came the boom! 

T. S. Van Dyke in his book, Millionaires of a Day, says, “From 1870 to 1875 Southern California was passing out of the control of the large landowners, nearly all of whom were raising cattle, horses, and sheep to the exclusion of everything else, and into the control of the general farmer and fruit grower. In 1885 and 1886 the rumble of the coming boom was heard.” In Elsinore, as everywhere else in Southern California, the boom had turned a sane citizenry into crazy people. Its collapse awakened them rudely from their dream. In 1888, Elsinore incorporated. In 1889 and 1890, people were settling down to sane living once more.  

The site of the Old Crescent Bath House probably has more history tied up with it than any other spot in Elsinore Valley. The early English (from 1873) and American (from 1883) settlers have told of using the hot springs for bathing and laundry work. On Monday mornings, wagons drove there with tubs, washboards, benches, and laundry. The women washed the clothes and hung them on bushes to dry. The men came for picnic lunches and would exchange news and conversation. 

The elaborate bathhouse must have been quite a sight to travelers of the late 1880s when driving down the sparsely settled streets of Elsinore in their spring wagons or on horseback. The huge two-story building of Moorish design with the highly decorated arches, complete with splines, a large crescent beneath the upper story porch gable and the three towering cupolas which topped the ridge crown. Add this to the color scheme of dark red, yellow, and green for the main building and horizontal roof striping of the same color, must have been intriguing indeed. The building is unique to Lake Elsinore history in that it is the only bathhouse still standing and still capable of offering medicinal services. 

Crescent Bathhouse, National Register of Historic Places. Accessed December 30th 2020. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/123860456.

Lech, Steve. Back in the Day: Lake Elsinore’s Crescent Bath House once offered relaxation in mineral waters, The Press-Enterprise. March 22nd 2018. Accessed January 22nd 2021. https://www.pe.com/2018/03/22/back-in-the-day-crescent-bath-house-in-lake-elsinore-is-an-architectural-gem/.