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Saratoga Springs The Horses. Drive around the east and south sides of Saratoga and you'll be amazed at the number of stables, racetracks, horses, horse people and hangers-on, especially in August. Louisville has its Kentucky Derby and Baltimore the Preakness, but the real high rollers come to Saratoga for six weeks of racing and allied activities. Socialite Marylou Whitney's annual gala at the Canfield Casino to benefit the National Museum of Dance launches a whirlwind of balls and fund-raisers all through August. The Saratoga Race Course off Union Avenue, oldest thoroughbred flat track in the country (1863), attracts the highest average daily attendance of any track (about 28,000) for its recently extended season from late July through August. As many as 50,000 show up for its major Travers Stakes race. Because so many winners of Triple Crown events have lost at Saratoga, the track has become known as “the graveyard of favorites.” The place is massive: 17,000 seats, hundreds of stables, five restaurants and an infield with a pond upon which floats an Indian canoe, painted the colors of the owner of the last Travers winner. Breakfast at the track – watching the morning workouts and mixing with the trainers – is a tradition. Folks eventually move into the sprawling grandstand, rife with red and white striped awnings, gilded cupolas and thousands of geraniums and petunias, to bet an average of $3.5 million a day. Races, daily except Tuesday at 1. Open from mid-January to late November is the Saratoga
Equine Sports Center, near Crescent and Nelson avenues. Considered
by some the world’s most beautiful half-mile track, the standardbred
harness track opened on a former Whitney estate in 1941. Races are
staged Tuesday-Sunday in July and August. Tours are available, and the Saratoga
Harness Hall of Fame has exhibits in an old horseman’s building.
World-class polo also is offered at the Whitney Polo Field here
in summer. National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, Union Avenue and Ludlow Street. Enter not through a turnstile but a set of starting gates next to a life-size fiberglass horse and jockey frozen at the moment of a race's start. The sounds of horses loading, jockeys yelling and stalls flying open propel you into an arena that does for horse racing what Cooperstown's Hall of Fame does for baseball. It relates the past, present and future of thoroughbred racing through the latest in you-are-there museum gadgetry. An impressive, fifteen-minute film called “Race America,” a montage of racing from coast to coast, is shown in the Hall of Fame auditorium. Famous jockeys and trainers explain their techniques through videos in a simulated racetrack area. (518) 584-0400. Open daily in racing season, 9 to
5; rest of year, 10 to 4:30, Sunday noon to 4:30. Adults, $5. The Canfield Casino, Congress Park. John Morrissey, the U.S. Congressman who was principal sponsor of the thoroughbred racetrack, opened the gambling casino in 1870 in what is now a downtown park and sculpture garden separating Broadway from Union Avenue, the main corridor to the racetrack. In the casino-turned-Canfield Museum, the Historical Society of Saratoga Springs traces the town's growth from a frontier village into a flamboyant international resort in two museums and an art gallery on the upper floors. (518) 584-6920. Open June-September,
Monday-Saturday 10 to 4 and Sunday 1 to 4. Closed Monday and Tuesday
rest of year. Adults, $3. National Museum of Dance, 99 South Broadway. The nation's only museum devoted exclusively to professional dance occupies the former Washington Baths, now beautifully restored through the beneficence of the Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitneys. Since its opening in 1986, three exhibitions relating to the history of dance have been mounted each year. The focal point is the Mr. and Mrs. C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame, honoring the principals of American dance. (518) 584-2225. Open Memorial Day to
mid-December, Tuesday-Sunday 10 to 5. Adults, $3.50. Saratoga Spa State Park, off Route 9 South. Perhaps the grandest park of its kind, this is a 2,000-acre island of serenity at the edge of the Saratoga hubbub. Enter through the soaring Avenue of the Pines past one of two golf courses. All the Georgian Revival brick pavilions, arched promenades, domed ceilings and marble arcades are flanked by pools, fountains and deep, pine-shaded lawns. Of special interest are the Hall of Springs, the Spa Little Theater, the classical Victoria Pool and the larger, Olympic-size Peerless Pool. Besides swimming, there are places for walking, running, cross-country skiing and ice-skating. The park was created to protect the springs, which at the turn of the century were in danger of being commercialized into oblivion. Most of the construction took place in the mid-1930s as a WPA project. “The park is unique in the state and maybe the world,” said the manager. “You couldn't build this today.” (518) 584-2535. Open daily, 8 a.m. to dusk.
Parking $4, Memorial Day to Labor Day. Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Saratoga Spa State Park. An amphitheater at the edge of the state park has seats for 5,100, and up to 25,000 more crowd the lawns for performances here. The New York City Opera is in residence in June, July brings the New York City Ballet and August the Philadelphia Orchestra. The Saratoga Jazz Festival and the Saratoga Chamber Music Festival also take place here. Special-event superstars range from Bonnie Raitt to James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt to Steve Winwood. (518) 587-3330. Prices vary, generally $13 on the
lawn and $17.50 to $82.50 for reserved seats. The Springs. Long before racing took hold here, Saratoga was renowned for its carbonated mineral springs. What made Saratoga different from other watering spas, however, was the racing and the high rollers it attracted. The fizzy waters, often smelling like eggs gone bad, can be sampled at more than 50 springs around town. A pavilion recently was built around the original Congress Spring in Congress Park, the downtown layout designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Nearby are the domed Columbian Spring pavilion and the Hathorn Spring on Spring Street. North of downtown near Excelsior and High Rock avenues are the High Rock Spring and Red Spring, named for the color of its water. The heaviest concentration is in Saratoga Spa State Park. You can drink the waters, if you like, or soak in them. The Lincoln Mineral Baths, Saratoga Spa State Park. The Lincoln Bathhouse – built in 1930 as the largest of its kind in the world – is a good place in which to relax after over-indulging in Saratoga's good life. Stress and pain float away as you sink into a deep tub of hot, bubbly, beige mineral water in a private room, $16 for twenty minutes, followed by a half-hour’s nap while wrapped in hot sheets. For $30 more, a massage therapist will massage you from head to toe. Other wrap, facial and spa treatments are available by appointment. This and the other two architecturally grand mineral baths that drew thousands to Saratoga in years past for the cure are being upgraded by the concessionaire that runs the Gideon Putnam Hotel. For more upscale surroundings (Italian marble and crystal chandeliers), head for the privately owned Crystal Spa at 92 South Broadway, fed by the Rosemary Spring outside the Grand Union Motel. (518) 583-2880. July and August: daily 9 to 4,
Saturday to 4:30. June and September: Wednesday-Monday 9 to 4. Rest of
year: Wednesday-Sunday 9 to 4. Mineral baths are offered without
appointments. Yaddo Gardens, Union Avenue. A private estate turned into a working arts community, the 55-room mansion just east of the flat track has played host since 1926 to 200 artists, writers and composers each year in an environment free of distractions. Some get their inspiration from the atmospheric rose and sculpture gardens, which are open to the public and well worth seeing. Modeled after formal turn-of-the-century Italian gardens, they have a colonnaded, rose-covered pergola as the dominant feature. On the terrace below are four oblong beds of red and white roses joined by a central Florentine fountain. Tucked among pine trees above the pergola is a rock garden of Japanese design. (518) 584-0746. Grounds open daily, 8 a.m. to
dusk. Free. Extra-SpecialCaffé Lena, 47 Phila St., Saratoga Springs. The oldest continuously operated coffeehouse in the country, this was run from 1960 until her death in 1989 by Lena Spencer, called “the Mother Teresa of folk music.” Her friends and patrons have banded together to continue the tradition since. “It's been a struggle, but we’ve endured,” said one. Her legacy remains in the small upstairs room full of atmosphere as patrons enjoy the music along with good coffees, teas and homemade pastries (no smoking and no alcohol). Many are the name folksingers and cabaret singers who have entertained at Lena's. Bob Dylan and Don McLean first found an audience here; Arlo Guthrie sang here long before the rest of the world heard his music. The tradition, as they say, continues. (518) 583-0022. Open Thursday-Sunday from 6 or 7. Material excerpted from Inn Spots & Special Places / Mid-Atlantic, by Nancy and Richard Woodworth. Copyright 2003. Wood Pond Press E-mail feedback to: Home
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