LOST VEGAS: Spring Fever Spa (aka The Soak n’ Poke)

Posted on: December 23, 2024, 04:50h. 

Last updated on: December 23, 2024, 05:12h.

Rarely does a town’s most notorious sex hotel so blatantly advertise what it is, but this was Las Vegas. Not only that, it was the ’80s.

“Romantic private spa suites,” the steamy postcards, billboards and even TV ads for Spring Fever Spa announced. “Affordable hourly rates.”

Most Las Vegas locals who were at least 15 before Spring Fever Spa closed still remember the campaign, and their reaction whenever they’d drive by the unassuming building.

“To hormonal suburban teens whose sex education was a tortured fantasia based on ‘Hustler’ magazine stashes in desert lots and furtive, hurried doses of scrambled Playboy Channel, Spring Fever, by contrast, thrummed with unbearable vibrations of immanent erotic reality,” Andrew Kiraly wrote in this hilarious 2022 Desert Companion tribute.

“You just knew actual people were having actual sex in there, whipping up frantic jacuzzi soufflés of chlorinated love-froth.”

Check out one of its steamy ads yourself and see how much composure you can muster…

Hot Tub Time Machine

Inspired by the California hot tub craze, Spring Fever (aka the Soak n’ Poke, as every local referred to it) featured 22 octagonal suites, each with a bed, sauna, shower and lounge. In the middle of the octagon was a Jacuzzi. Copious floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the tile walls reflected whatever show each couple felt like putting on.

Its doors were opened (and apparently never locked, since it operated 24/7) in June 1979 by Michael S. Mack, Charles Mack and Laurence Friedman. According to Kiraly’s research, Michael was the cousin of Nevada banker and UNLV benefactor Jerry Mack (the “Mack” in UNLV’s Thomas & … Arena).

The place also came with its own urban myth. One of its customers supposedly bought some VHS porn tapes in Thailand and discovered himself and his mistress starring in one. (Remember those mirrors? They were two-way!)

So the guy — now divorced, of course — sues Spring Fever and forces its closure.

After rehashing the myth in its own remembrance of Spring Fever in 2014, the Las Vegas Advisor received an email from a reader.

“I am from the Chicago area and we had the Pioneer Motel in Lansing, Ill. with the same urban myth about guests seeing themselves in a porn movie,” it read.

As Mark Twain once said: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

New Hands

Spring Fever was purchased in 1991 by Michael O. Washington. A Vietnam War vet decorated with two purple hearts, he gained national notoriety in 1984 by receiving another kind. He was chosen to receive the transplanted heart of actor Jon-Erik Hexum, after the star of TV’s “Voyagers!” died from an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound while playing Russian Roulette on set.

That’s a lot to get through before coming to our main point … that Washington also owned an outcall service called Swinging Suzy’s Dancers and Entertainers, which presented some bad optics in the eyes of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

“Washington says the police have already been snooping around to see if there is a connection between the spa and the outcall biz,” the Las Vegas Sun wrote in 1991. “There isn’t, he says. The place is being run the same way it always has.”

As we explained while busting the myth of legal Las Vegas prostitution, it’s perfectly lawful for an escort to accept money to come to a stranger’s hotel room for a reason that’s unspecified. It’s also legal to advertise this service. In fact, it used to take up more than 100 pages of the telephone directory.

Whatever a paid escort chooses to do once they get to your room may be legal or illegal. But it’s nothing the police can do anything about if no one calls them.

However, Washington apparently had his escorts take their Johns back to Spring Fever. That’s a serious no-no that prompted District Judge James Brennan to announce, before sentencing Washington to three years in prison on a plea bargain: “It appears he’s been operating a bordello in the wrong county.”

Brothels are legal in every Nevada county except Clark (where Las Vegas is) and Washoe (home to Reno).

Burn Baby Burn

Spring Fever burned down at 9:30 p.m. on July 20, 1994, after three couples and a few employees were safely evacuated. The incident prompted another myth — that the fire was started by a jealous spouse of one of its clients. According to the Clark County fire investigators, though, plain old lightning was to blame.

Incidentally, Mark Twain never said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” What he did say, as quoted by Rudyard Kipling in his 1899 collection of notes, letters, and essays called “From Sea to Sea,” was: “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”

“Lost Vegas” is an occasional Casino.org series spotlighting Las Vegas’ forgotten history. Click here to read other entries in the series. Think you know a good Vegas story lost to history? Email [email protected].