Canfield Casino and Congress Park

The district boundaries are curved and irregular, generally following those of the park itself. It is bordered by Spring Street on the north and Circular Street down to its intersection with Park Place. It follows the 300-foot (91 m) elevation contour line on the west, excluding some of the buildings on Broadway southwest of the park, and then joins Broadway south of Union Avenue, back to its northwest corner at Spring Street.[4]

The original historic district included some houses on Circular and Spring Streets and Whitney Place. Their removal from it made the district about 16 acres (6.5 ha) smaller[3]

A short, narrow street, named East Congress Street – because it extends Congress Street from Broadway – runs across the park from east to west. Stone walls set off the park from the nearby street. The section north of the road is dominated by the casino and the parkland around it, the section to the south is primarily hilly parkland.

The park is a buffer between the developed commercial areas at the south end of downtown Saratoga Springs, and the residential neighborhoods on the east and west. Many of the surrounding areas are also included in the city's other historic districts. The Broadway Historic District is just to the north, with the East and West Side districts on either side. Union Avenue is also a historic district out to the racetrack.

The two major historical resources on the property are the casino and the park. The former are the only surviving buildings from the resort era; the latter has many notable art objects in addition to its landscaping.

1907 postcard of dining room

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, the Congress Hotel or Congress Hall, 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.[4]

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.[4]

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 to Saratoga a few years afterwards 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.[4]

John Morrissey, who opened the Saratoga Race Course, ca. 1860

By the middle of the century the city and the hotel were one of the country's most popular resorts, due to its railroad access. It lost some business during the Civil War when its Southern clientele 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. He also began the Saratoga Clubhouse, which would later become the Canfield Casino, after the war, in 1866.[4]

In 1866, Morrissey was elected to Congress as a Democrat who was part of 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, Morrissey got Frederick Law Olmsted and Jacob Weidenmann to do some landscaping on the park.[4]

After Morrissey's death in 1878, ownership passed to Albert Spencer and Charles Reed. In 1893, Richard Albert Canfield took a partnership in the Saratoga Clubhouse, and bought it outright in 1894 for $250,000.[10][11] ^nventory Nomination Form Canfield invested an estimated $800,000 in enhancing the building and the grounds of Congress Park to bring them up to the standards of the top European establishments. In 1902-3, he added a sumptuous dining room to the back of the Clubhouse fitting it with stained glass windows and an early form of air conditioning. He ordered marble statuary for the Italian gardens in the northeast corner of Congress Park. The elegant atmosphere made the cream of society feel welcome to bet their money on the Clubhouses's many games of chance. Canfield was recognized as the King of the Gamblers and Saratoga Springs was seen as the American Monte Carlo. Canfield kept the Clubhouse going until 1907. 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 "Bet-a-Million" Gates, and prominent entertainers like Gate's girlfriend Lillian Russell and impresario Florenz Ziegfeld.[4]

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.[4]

In 1912, the city bought Congress Spring Park and tore down the Congress Hotel and the Congress Spring Bottling Plant. Their sites would later host a public library – built in 1949 and expanded in 1967, now the headquarters of Saratoga Arts – and the Trask Memorial Fountain. The park and the grounds of the casino were combined into Congress Park in 1913. In 1914, Henry Bacon and Charles Leavitt were engaged to do further work on the park's landscaping.[4]

• 
  The Spirit of Life (1914) by Daniel Chester French is part of the Trask Memorial Fountain
• 
  The Carousel in Congress Park was moved from Kaydeross Park on Saratoga Lake and re-opened in 2002
• 
  The Palladian Circle, featuring statues of satyrs and Maenads around a sundial, is part of the Italian Gardens
• 
  The World War Memorial Pavilion was dedicated in 1931
• 
  The Columbian Fountain's domed pavilion is a modern reproduction

• List of National Historic Landmarks in New York
• National Register of Historic Places listings in Saratoga County, New York
• Broadway Historic District (Saratoga Springs, New York)
• East Side Historic District (Saratoga Springs, New York)
• Union Avenue Historic District (Saratoga Springs, New York)
• West Side Historic District (Saratoga Springs, New York)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Canfield Casino.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Congress Park.

• Saratoga Springs History Museum
• Saratoga Springs Visitor Center
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