Saratoga

Saratoga was built on water that tastes terrible and people traveled hundreds of miles to drink it.

The mineral springs were known to the Mohawk and were being visited by Europeans by the 1780s. By the middle of the nineteenth century the town had become the most fashionable resort in America, and the scale of the hotels is hard to credit now. The Grand Union covered seven acres and could accommodate over a thousand guests. The United States Hotel had a veranda more than two hundred feet long. Both were among the largest buildings in the country.

The routine was fixed. Drink the waters at the spring in the morning, promenade, dine enormously, dance in the evening. The verandas were the social center and photographs of them, lined with rocking chairs and people in white, are the signature image of the place.

Racing arrived in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, organized by a former prizefighter and gambler named John Morrissey who understood exactly what the crowd wanted. Saratoga Race Course is the oldest sporting venue of any kind in continuous operation in the United States, and the August meeting still runs.

Gambling came with it and was the real business. Morrissey\u2019s Club House, later run by Richard Canfield, was among the most elegant casinos in the world, operating openly and illegally for decades because everyone who mattered was inside it. Reform closed it in 1907.

The photographs from the racecourse are the best material. The wooden grandstand with its turrets, the paddock under the elms, the crowds along the rail, and horses being led through a scene that has changed remarkably little.

One thing worth noting about the springs. They are naturally carbonated, which was the attraction, and the bottling trade grew large enough that so much water was pumped for commercial sale that several springs stopped flowing. The state took the ground over in the 1900s to stop it.

For dating, the hats and the grandstand help. The Grand Union and the United States hotels both came down in the 1950s, so any photograph containing them is earlier.

The town had a serious literary and political side alongside the gambling. Party conventions were held there, deals were made on the hotel verandas, and the summer population included a substantial share of the people who ran the country. A great deal of nineteenth-century American politics was conducted in Saratoga in August.

The bottling and the bathhouses came back under state ownership in the 1930s. The Saratoga Spa State Park, built with New Deal money, put up bathhouses, a hotel and a theater in a formal Georgian arrangement, and that complex is the last serious American attempt to build a European-style spa.

The mineral springs each had a character and a following. High Rock, Congress, Hathorn, Geyser — people held opinions about which water suited which complaint, and the pavilions built over them are among the most photographed structures in the town.

The town also produced the potato chip, in 1853, at Moon’s Lake House on the lake road — an origin story that is probably embroidered but which the town has never had any reason to correct.

The Tallest Thing Ever Built, For a Little While