Canfield Casino and Congress Park - History

History

Congress Spring was named in 1792 when it was visited by a group that included two members of the newly established U.S. Congress. A decade later, in 1803, an entrepreneur named Gideon Putnam bought the acre (2,000 m²) around the spring and built a hotel for guests, in what was still a largely unsettled frontier. Two years later he bought the 130 acres (53 ha) around the original acre and laid out plans for the town of Saratoga Springs.

This led to two enlargements of the hotel. He died in 1812 while yet another was underway. The new town competed with nearby Ballston Spa and other spa towns in Pennsylvania and Virginia for visitors. It was at an early disadvantage since one of the first temperance societies in the country had been established in Saratoga Springs, and not only alcohol but gambling and dancing were at first forbidden in the town.

Those bans were gradually relaxed to attract more resort business, and by 1820 were effectively repealed. John Clarke, who had run the first soda fountain in New York City, moved up to Saratoga a few years after that and bought the spring property. He began to bottle and sell Saratoga water, promoting the iodine he had discovered in the water as a curative. This success allowed him to improve the site and create the crescent-shaped lawn, as well as drain some of the swampy areas.

By the middle of the century the city and the hotel were one of the country's most popular resorts, due to railroad access. It lost some business during the Civil War when some of its Southern guests could not visit, but during that time former heavyweight boxing champion John Morrissey opened the Saratoga Race Course, giving the city another major tourist attraction. After the war, in 1866, he opened the first part of the Casino.

He was elected to Congress himself that year, as a Democrat from New York City's Tammany Hall political machine. He was well-connected, acquainted with tycoons of the era like Jay Gould, William R. Travers and Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who were among his partners in the hotel and racetrack. They gave both a reputation for wealthy and fashionable guests that it continued to enjoy long afterwards. In 1876 he got Frederick Law Olmsted and Jacob Weidenmann to do some work on the park landscape.

After his death in 1878, two other New York City gamblers took over management. They sold it to John Canfield 16 years later, in 1894. He embarked on another wave of expansion, building a formal garden next to the casino, enlarging it and making it more luxurious than it had been before. This culminated in the construction of the diningroom in 1903. The clientele during this period included not only members of wealthy families like the Whitneys, Vanderbilts and J. P. Morgan's, but gambling legends like Diamond Jim Brady and John Warne Gates and prominent entertainers like Gate's girlfriend Lillian Russell and Florenz Ziegfeld.

This socially distinctive era, regarded as the city's golden age, ended in 1907 when reformers succeeded in banning gambling in the city. Canfield retired and sold the hotel and grounds to the city four years later, in 1911. The Pure Food and Drug Act hurt sales of bottled Saratoga Water, and the year after buying from Canfield, the city bought the Congress Hall hotel and bottling plant and demolished them.

In 1913, the present park was created. Henry Bacon and Charles Leavitt were hired to do further work on its landscape.