Jon Sterngass, the author of First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure
at Saratoga Springs, Newport and Coney Island will give a lecture
titled “The Legacy of Saratoga Springs as a Resort Community” on
Monday, May 20, at 8 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.
Sterngass, who teaches history at the College, writes that
Saratoga Springs is relatively unchanged since the early 1800s when
Gideon Putnam's grand hotels tapped into the popularity of the mineral
water spas.
Today, more than 50 years after the hugely successful
Grand Union and U.S. hotels were demolished, the city still
boasts what Henry James lambasted in an 1870 travel sketch as “a
momentous spectacle: the democratization of elegance.”
That democratized elegance is precisely what makes
Saratoga Springs so special, according to Sterngass, whose book is
an unusual multi-site historical study spanning a century of
American leisure at the Northeast's best-known playgrounds.