| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jon Sterngass. First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport and Coney Island. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. Pp. ix, 374. $36.50.
Historians now study nineteenth-century resorts and the society they attracted as readily as emerging industrial centers in the antebellum, Civil War, and Gilded Age eras. The application of the historians' craft is welcome, since previous histories of resorts tended to be self-promotions based on impressionistic evidence. In the past decade, two types of studies have widened our critical knowledge considerably. One emphasizes the visitors and shows on a national or sectional scale who they were, when they came, and what places they frequented. A rarer type of study concerns the communities that became resorts, placing the emphasis on the hosts and what they did to attract visitors. The former has the challenge of creating a broad psychology that encouraged Americans to travel and spend time at a resort; the latter requires in-depth analysis of the infrastructure—physical, social and economic—needed to create a resort.	1
At first glance this book appears to be of the second type. It features the study of two New York resorts, Saratoga Springs and Coney Island, and Newport, Rhode Island. But Jon Sterngass is only superficially interested in these communities or the hosts; his book belongs to the former group, for what he emphasizes is the views of visitors and journalists who came to the three resorts. Their concerns are expanded upon by comments on American society as a whole and literary material, so that we are shown how nineteenth-century American society reacted to the "pursuit of pleasure." The author's interest is in the "cultural symbols" that created "unconscious patterns of behavior" that led to "latent social changes."	2
From his analysis of the three resorts, Sterngass adopts a thesis that splits the nineteenth century at midpoint. Before the Civil War, the amusements of resorts were free, existing "outside the market economy." Despite inhibitions and gentility, travelers tried to be anonymous so that they could bond with perfect strangers. Visitors enjoyed a "liminal" experience that allowed for social experimentation without regard to dignity or place. After the Civil War, transportation improvements allowed larger and more diverse crowds to appear, as the resort experience was now motivated by privatization and the successful commercialization of resort services. Strikingly, as Newport hotels fell into disfavor, they were replaced by the grand suburban "cottages" that allowed the rich to separate themselves from other visitors. At Saratoga Springs, gambling at Morrisey's Club House and the racetrack were commodities sold to diverse consumers. The book is organized with chapters devoted to each resort before the Civil War, followed by a transitional chapter and then three chapters showing the changes at each resort.	3
I have problems with much of this. Sterngass will not admit that some visitors came for reasons of health and moral revival or that visitors paid dearly for amusements at the resorts, regardless of the era. In antebellum Saratoga Springs, visitors wanted to find a place in existing society, and the rituals and public spaces were created so that they could maintain their traditional roles; the last thing they wanted was a liminal experience. In fact, most of the commercialization Sterngass identifies as having taken place after the Civil War took place in the 1830s and 1840s: the influence of railroads and steamboats, accompanied by hotel expansion; the development of parks as adjuncts to bottling works; and the placement of cottages on hotel grounds (rented to proper families, not places for assignations). In Saratoga Springs, efforts to regulate space by charging admission and controlling crowds were introduced in the 1820s at numerous pleasure gardens, which were the forerunners of the amusement park. It made the newspapers when a service was free! Local entrepreneurs, many of whom Sterngass misses altogether, were there in the early nineteenth-century providing the entire infrastructure that allowed for continuation of Saratoga Springs's growth after the Civil War. Moreover, the commodification of leisure, which is the hallmark of his second era, was far from successful. Morrisey's gambling establishment was in practice an exclusive men's club; its services were not sold to a broad public, and it was a business failure, despite Morrisey's extensive investment.	. . .

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