Saratoga Springs: from genteel spa to Disneyified family resort

Abstract

Early in the nineteenth century, Saratoga Springs became the model spa town of the American Northeast with easy access to New York City, promising health restoration with its many mineral springs. Soon, however, it became a venue of elite socializing and later of horse racing, gambling, and shopping. While it lost customers by the 1920s to dispersed car-accessible sites and to the decline of genteel crowd-gathering, it was revived in the 1960s and 1970s with government support and its genteel memory was celebrated in 2007 as the theme of Walt Disney World's latest and largest resort complex. Still, Disney created only a hollowed out version of Saratoga Springs, reducing it to a pastiche of architectural accents while reproducing the standard Disney family formula of comfortable modern lodgings, pools, sports, and restaurants. But the need to recall the spa culture of the nineteenth century suggests a longing of middle-class Disney visitors for a lost world in the twenty-first century.