The water tastes like a battery dipped in seltzer. That is, more or less, the whole reason Saratoga Springs exists. In the summer of 1792, a small group of United States congressmen pushed north through the pine forests above Albany, came upon a bubbling, iron-rich spring rising from glacial fault lines, and drank. Whatever they said is lost - but they liked it enough that the name 'Congress Spring' stuck. Within a generation the spring had pulled a town, a railroad, a horse track, casinos, and a Gilded Age aristocracy into the middle of nowhere. The spring still bubbles today inside Congress Park, a 17-acre National Historic Landmark district at the south end of Broadway. The Doric pavilion that shelters it was built to advertise water; the manicured paths around it lead to a vanished empire of bottling plants and gambling halls. Saratoga is a place that grew up around a taste.
Saratoga's springs are not accidental. A long north-south fault, the McGregor Fault, slices through Cambrian and Ordovician bedrock here, and over the last ten thousand years - since the last glaciers retreated - groundwater has been working its way through limestone and into the gas-rich shales below. The water absorbs carbon dioxide under pressure and surfaces, naturally carbonated and loaded with bicarbonates, calcium, magnesium, lithium, iron, and salt. There are more than 200 effervescent springs in the Saratoga area, each with its own mineral signature and aggressively distinctive flavor. Some are bitter; some are metallic; one or two taste, faintly, of the ocean. None of them taste like nothing, which is the whole appeal.
Gideon Putnam was a New England Quaker carpenter with no particular fortune and a clear eye for opportunity. In 1803 he bought a single acre around Congress Spring, then borrowed for 130 more, and on that land he began to lay out, by hand and survey, the village of Saratoga Springs. He built the Congress Hotel, the first of the great Saratoga inns, and platted Broadway as the wide avenue it remains today. Putnam died in 1812 after falling from scaffolding on a hotel he was building. He had been on the property less than a decade. The town he sketched on his survey paper grew into a resort that, by the Civil War, was hosting the wealthiest families in America.
Drinking the water from a tin cup at a marble fountain became a fashionable summer ritual. But the water also traveled. Beginning in the 1820s, the entrepreneur John Clarke bottled Congress water by the thousands, shipping cases to New York, Boston, New Orleans, London, even Calcutta. Doctors of the era prescribed it for indigestion, gout, and 'female complaints' - claims modern medicine would not endorse but which sold a great deal of mineral water. The bottling plants ringed the springs and pumped them so aggressively that by 1900 several springs had stopped flowing entirely. Pumping was eventually restricted; the springs recovered. The old glass bottles, embossed with eagles and the word CONGRESS, now sell at antique fairs as souvenirs of a vanished commercial empire.
Once the resort existed, the resort attracted everything resorts attract. The Saratoga Race Course opened in August 1863, a month after the Battle of Gettysburg - America's oldest continuously operating thoroughbred track. Richard Canfield bought the elegant Saratoga Club House in 1894 and ran it as 'the American Monte Carlo' until New York reformers killed legal gambling in 1907. The clubhouse, a Renaissance Revival jewel of pressed tin and marble, still stands in Congress Park; it now houses the Saratoga Springs History Museum. A few miles east, the physician Edward Livingston Trudeau, himself tubercular, was building a sanatorium for working-class TB patients in the Adirondacks - the Saratoga region had become, by the late 19th century, a place people came hoping to be cured of almost anything.
Congress Park covers 17 acres at the south end of Broadway in downtown Saratoga Springs, New York, listed on the National Register in 1972 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987. The Italian Gardens, the Spirit of Life sculpture by Daniel Chester French (better known for Lincoln in the Memorial), and the small spring pavilions are all walkable in an afternoon. Cups are provided near the tap; the water remains free and remains very strange. The Canfield Casino houses the local history museum. The race meet runs late July through early September. Albany International Airport (KALB) is 32 miles south; Saratoga County Airport (5B2), a small GA field, is two miles west.
Located at 43.0791°N, 73.7823°W in Saratoga Springs, New York, at the southeastern edge of the Adirondack foothills. From altitude, Congress Park appears as a small rectangle of green at the south end of Saratoga's long downtown grid; the rectangular Saratoga Race Course is unmistakable a mile to the east. The Hudson River runs east of town; the high peaks of the Adirondacks rise to the north. Albany International Airport (KALB) is 32 miles south; Saratoga County Airport (5B2) sits two miles southwest of town. Lake George is 24 miles north.