Canfield Casino: Saratoga's American Monte Carlo

Congress Park in the heart of Saratoga Springs has two histories layered on top of each other. One is of therapeutic mineral springs and democratic promenading. The other is of some of the most glamorous illegal gambling in nineteenth-century America.

The springs came first. Congress Spring was discovered in seventeen ninety-two and tubed for public use by Gideon Putnam, the developer who essentially invented Saratoga Springs as a destination. The water, naturally carbonated and heavy with minerals, was marketed across the country for its supposed digestive benefits, becoming one of the earliest commercially distributed bottled waters in the United States. By the eighteen forties, the spring and its surrounding park had been laid out with formal gardens, pavilions, and promenades where the wealthy came to take the waters and be seen taking them.

Then came John Morrissey. The former bare-knuckle boxing champion turned congressman opened a gambling house in Saratoga in eighteen sixty-one, recognizing that the same wealthy resort visitors who drank the mineral water also liked to play cards. In eighteen seventy he opened the Saratoga Club House in Congress Park, an elegant building meant to evoke European casino culture. It worked brilliantly.

In eighteen ninety-three, Richard Canfield, who would become known as the King of Gamblers, bought into the club and eventually purchased it outright the following year for two hundred fifty thousand dollars. He spent an estimated eight hundred thousand more upgrading the building and grounds, installing stained glass windows, an early form of air conditioning, and a dining room good enough to attract Auguste Escoffier's endorsement. The Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, Diamond Jim Brady, and John Gates were regulars.

Local reformers finally shut it down in the early nineteen hundreds. The city bought the building for a hundred fifty thousand dollars in nineteen eleven, the same price Canfield had paid for just a partnership stake. It is now the Saratoga Springs History Museum, housed in the casino where the money once flowed through the night.