"Canfield Casino and Congress Park is a 17-acre (6.9 ha) site in Saratoga Springs, New York, United States. It was the site of the former Congress Spring Bottling Plant and the former Congress Hall, a large resort hotel, which together brought Saratoga Springs international fame as a health spa and gambling site. At the peak of its popularity it was a place where the wealthy, major gamblers and stars of the entertainment world mingled. The park's artwork includes a statue by Daniel Chester French and a landscape design by Frederick Law Olmsted, among others.
It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987 after having originally been submitted and listed as the Casino-Congress Park-Circular Street Historic District in 1972. The later listing excluded some of the property outside the park and halved the overall size of the district.
Congress Park is currently operated by the City of Saratoga Springs as a park, bounded by Broadway, Spring Street, and Circular Street in Saratoga Springs. The Canfield Casino building, built in 1870, houses the Saratoga Springs History Museum. Gambling was ended by reformers in 1907.
Property
The two major historical resources on the property are the casino and the park. The former is the only surviving building from the resort era; the latter has many notable art objects in addition to its landscaping.
Casino
The casino's main block is a three-story building faced in brick on an exposed basement. It is topped by a flat roof, bordered by an ornate bracketed cornice. On the south (front) facade the brick around the doorway and at the corners is laid to look like rusticated stone. A belt course divides the first two floors.
All three stories have sandstone window trim with a different treatment — segmented pediments on the first, triangular ones on the second and rectangular on the third. A free-standing segmental pediment distinguishes the roofline on the front center as well.
The east wing, used for gambling when the casino was constructed, is a two-story, three-by-five-bay structure with front windows one and a half stories high. It has a similar window treatment to the first story of the main block, and a more elaborate cornice, also with central segmented pediment.
To the north is the dining room and kitchen wing, a 93-by-58-foot (28 by 18 m) steel frame brick structure. At either end are stained glass windows depicting horses in different historical periods.
Inside, the entrance opens onto a central hall with staircase. The office and library are on the west. To the east the original dining room opens onto the gambling room. Private gambling rooms were upstairs, and living quarters on the third floor.
The gambling room has many of its original interior details, including mirrors and statuettes. The dining room roof is of riveted arches supported on columns. Its barrel vaulting has octagonal coffers. The parquet flooring is original, and the early air conditioning system of wall vents and the open coffer windows still works.
Park
The basin-shaped park contains Grecian pavilions around the springs, Italian gardens, groves of trees and lawns. A Doric columned pavilion has been built over the site of the original Congress Spring, with water piped in from another spring. To its west is the Columbian Spring tapped by Gideon Putnam, the founder of Saratoga Springs, restored in 1983 and topped with a similarly Greek-inspired domed pavilion. The Congress 3 spring to the south was bottled and distributed worldwide in the 19th century, and the Freshwater Spring is still popular with city residents.
The water from the springs has been channeled into streams and fountains. One surrounds The Spirit of Life, a statue by Daniel Chester French memorializing Spencer Trask, a great benefactor of the Saratoga area who founded the Yaddo writers' colony. It sits on the south side of the large lagoon in the park. Two vases, Night and Day, by Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, are positioned on the lawn in front of the casino."
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