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(More customer reviews)Sterngass's history of three of the first American resorts -- Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Coney Island -- shows in fascinating detail how these sites came to give birth to commercial leisure in the U.S. Destined for classic status, Sterngass has a solid theoretical grasp of the changing socioeconomics of leisure, and a winning narrative style. Built on exceptionally deep research, he weaves a dense and satisfying narrative of each resort and its place in American society from the early antebellum era to the early 20th century. Using primary sources such as diaries and letters as well contemporary newspapers and magazines, he shows with masterful command how each resort was shaped and then undone by local, regional, and national sociopolitical and economic factors.
He shows through lively anecdote, public records, brief biographies, and other primary sources, how these resorts at first document the free sociality of the antebellum period, a period during which Americans self-consciously created the institutions and practices of the first democratic society. He then shows how after the Civil War the concomitant rise of class distinctions based on wealth, the commercialization of leisure culture and its increasing privatization meshed with new consumerist values in such a way as to scuttle these egalitarian and democratic ideals as expressed through the relatively open culture of early resorts.
Sterngass relates, for instance, how it was that during an age of extreme religious piety (the Second Great Awakening) resorts were able to prosper in a still largely Calvinist society. He argues persuasively that early resort goers were part of long tradition of pilgrimage that had blossomed back in the Middle Ages.Saratoga's early entreprenuers touted the "healing" waters as"therapeutic," the "bathing" at Newport and Coney Island was touted by doctors as "restorative" and "re-creative." Not unlike the opium-laced patent medicines of the time, the healing waters were a cover for loosening of the usual social restraints. When tourists got to these early resorts, the hotel ballrooms (which featured nightly dancing), dining rooms (where twenty guests unknown to each other would be seated at table -- a practice which scandalized the European aristocracy who visited), and vast lobbies and porches (which fostered mingling, talking, and voyeurism) served as liminal spaces where the unexpectedly erotic or socially fortuitous meeting might occur. By contrast, the guest's rooms were tiny and ill-ventilated, a fact that seemed to bother no one -- after all the point was to see and be seen. And, just as importantly, there was no set formula, no expectation as to what accommodations in a resort hotel should be like. He also notes that for a country believed to be resolutely puritanical in its beliefs and industrious in its practices, that almost all Americans of the antebellum period went on vacation, and that a vacations of a month or more were common among the bourgeoisie and the aspiring middle class.
Saratoga's water were free for visitors and residents for better than fifty years. Early in the 1800s the town fathers passed a law to that effect, and in effect zealously guarded the amount of water that was drawn from the springs. Eventually, as leisure became more commercialized, the springs were fenced in, the water sold, and the springs, not surprisingly, were almost depleted -- an early parable of sound husbandry of natural resources giving way to the destructive forces of unbridled capitalism. Similarly, Newport's beaches were open to all from the early antebellum years until just after the Civil War, but soon after Newport was colonized by the robber barons and their friends, who attempted to privatize what had been held in common. When"cottage" dwellers like the Rockefellers and the Carnegies had trouble rescinding public access to the beach, they simply decided that bathing was not an activity people of their sort should engage in, thus creating just one of many rules that would police the boundaries between themselves and those unlike themselves.Coney Island, perhaps the most democratic of these resorts by virtue of its proximity to New York City, drew millions to its beaches and amusement parks every summer for decades, ending only in the 1940s. Sterngass shows how Coney Island's carnivalesque egalitarianism in the Gilded Age was the gift to New York of an amazing Irish politician, John McKane, whose great style and cunning helped create a safe escape for the city's burgeoning factory and office workers searching for diversion and excitement . The world's first great amusement space, nutured by the cagey McKane and his cronies, was very quickly copied the world over. Eventually brought down by reformers who consolidated the district with the rest of New York City and shuttered its rowdier establishments and attractions, the reformers drove McKane to an early grave, and instigated a process which eventually destroyed Coney's unique charms. The process continued to play out well into the 1950s when Coney's vitality finally succumbed under the weight of ill considered public housing projects, the massive infusion of money into suburban developments and the rise of car culture.
Well-illustrated with maps, photos, handbills, and other fascinating documents, this attractive book was published with great care by Johns Hopkins Press. Clearly, they believe they have a winner. I think they're right.
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