HISTORICAL WALK
History museum offering tours of Congress Park
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. » Looking for something different to do on the weekends? The Saratoga Springs History Museum at Canfield Casino is offering walking tours of Congress Park every Saturday.
The hour-long hike around the park will give visitors a glimpse of some of the park’s historically important landmarks and fixtures, accompanied by a talk about the historical significance and development of the area.
“We’ve got tours planned every weekend in August, and as long as there’s interest we’ll do them through September as well. We’ll keep doing them as long as people keep showing up,” said Jaime Parillo, executive director of the museum.
The fee for a tour is $20 per person and includes all-day admission to the museum. Alternatively, a visit to the museum alone is $8 per person. For either activity, social distancing must be maintained and masks must be worn at all times. Visi
The hourlong hike will give visitors a glimpse of some of the park’s landmarks and fixtures.
tors must sign in for contact tracing purposes.
The tour starts at the park’s natural spring, because as museum board president and tour guide Charlie Kuenzel puts it, “it’s all about the water.”
Saratoga Springs was first visited and settled by Mowhawk Native Americans, who prized and protected the water for its medicinal qualities. There are currently 17 active springs in the city, each with its own unique mineral composition and taste. From the spring, the tour moves to areas around the park such as the casino, the Italian garden, and the carousel.
The tour takes participants through the timeline of the city’s history, from its first European settlement by William Johnson to the first hotel opened by Gideon Putnam for people to spend summers at the springs to the establishment of what became the Canfield Casino. All of it centered around the healthful spring waters that were the city’s main attraction.
Putnam’s first hotel opened in 1802, just across the street from what today is Congress Park. It had room for 70 guests, who would stay through the summer. By the end of its first year, the hotel was attracting so much business that it needed an expansion. More hotels soon sprang up, each vying for customers’ money by trying to be the biggest, best, and most luxurious place for a wealthy family to stay.
One of Putnam’s associates, John Morrissey, who Kuenzel describes as “both innovative and practical,” saw that with the health of hotel guests rejuvenated, they were starting to look for ways to have fun. In 1863, despite gambling sports being illegal, the first horse race was held in Saratoga. Six horses ran and the event drew a crowd of 15,000 people.
In 1870, Morissey opened his “gentlemen’s club,” a place where officially, wealthy out-of-town men could gather to smoke cigars, read the papers, and socialize. Unofficially, it was the city’s first casino. Morrissey dodged the anti-gambling laws by paying people off and donating portions of his profits to all the churches and nonprofit organizations in the area. He kept the casino running successfully until his death 41 years later.
In 1894, the casino was purchased from the late Morrissey’s partners by Richard Canfield. He brought to the business new ideas and innovations that laid the groundwork for the modern gambling industry. His methods, such as keeping a full safe to give immediate payouts to winners and providing complementary services to guests in order to get them to stay longer, are the backbone of business practices in Las Vegas today.
In 1911, tired of the backand-forth fights with the city over keeping the casino open despite gambling still being illegal, Canfield sold the property and the surrounding park area to the city of Saratoga Springs. 1911 was also the year that the Congress Hall hotel, doing poorly after advances in transportation meant people were staying for shorter and shorter periods of time, was torn down. The city purchased the land it had stood on, and the entire area became the city-owned Congress Park.
Today, the history museum houses a large collection of artifacts from those early years of the Spa City, and the casino is a topchoice destination for weddings and formal occasions - pandemics notwithstanding.
Kuenzel’s tour highlights just some of the landmarks and important places in the park. “There’s so many good stories here,” he says. “To really do everything in the park justice, a tour would probably take four or five hours.”
Kuenzel says his “highlights” tour is refined from twenty years of experience with touring services. His choice of stops reflects the stories and sights that past participants liked the best. As for his own favorite part of the tour, Kuenzel says, “I love the casino and I love the springs.”
To reserve a spot for a Congress Park tour, which is suggested but not required, call the History Museum at 518-584-6920 x102.