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The State Reserved the Springs. The Cars Moved Into the Plant. · The Red Solo Traveler Podcast

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Imagine you're driving into a museum parking lot. You pull
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: the car around back, turn off the engine, and, well,
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: you step out. Right.
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: And you immediately smell pine needles.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Exactly. You smell the pine. You hear this distant hum
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: of a sprawling park. But before you can even look
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: for a ticket counter, you find yourself doing something entirely unexpected.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: You reach into your pocket, pull out a map, And
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: you have to unfold it just to figure out how
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: to walk to the front door.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: Which is wild for a car museum.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: It really is. Anyway, welcome to the Red Solo Traveler podcast. Today,
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: we are opening up a really remarkable set of travel
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: notes from Louis, the Red Solo Traveler. They're titled, The
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: State Reserved the Springs, The Cars Moved into the Plant. And,
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: you know, that little puzzle in the parking lot, that
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: is just the perfect introduction to how you have to
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: completely rethink the spaces you visit.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: It's such a disorienting way to start a trip, honestly,
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: which is what makes it brilliant. Most of the time,
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: a parking lot is just like an asphalt moat around
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: the castle you came to see.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you park, you walk in a straight line, and
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: you're inside.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: Exactly. But at the Saratoga Automobile Museum, the geography tells
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: you immediately that your car is absolutely not the center
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: of the universe here. The museum might be the reason
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: you type the destination into your GPS, but the park
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: surrounding you is the entire reason the museum even has
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: walls to begin with.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: And the scale of this place is just massive. The
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: address is 110 Avenue of the Pines.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Sounds quaint, right?
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: It does. It sounds like a little standalone street.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: But you aren't just next to a park or, you know,
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: across the street from a green space. You are physically
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: swallowed up deep inside Saratoga Spa State Park.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: We are talking about 2,379 acres of towering pine trees.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: And all that massive brick architecture.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: Yes. Massive bathhouses, a hotel, a sprawling performing arts bowl.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: There is so much monumental leftover architecture surrounding you that
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: the building holding the cars feels like, well, just one
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: piece of a much larger puzzle.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: Which really establishes the foundational lens for our entire conversation today.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: If you walk through those doors thinking you're just attending
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: a car show.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: You're completely missing the narrative beneath your feet. This building
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: is a civic leftover. The story today isn't really about
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: the cars on display. I mean, the story is the
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: building itself and the ghosts of the industry that originally
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: built it.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: So let's wind the clock way back and start with
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: that civic story, because the timeline of this land is wild.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: Saratoga Springs was selling a mineral cure way, way before
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: it ever sold a horse racing card. People were flocking
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: here for the water long before any grandstands went up.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely. The history goes back centuries before anyone even
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: thought about putting a resort on a postcard.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: Mohawk and Iroquois hunters already intimately knew these grounds. They
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: called the area Cayaterosaurus. And they understood the unique nature
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: of these bubbling, mineral-rich springs.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: And the first European to go there was Sir William Johnson,
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: wasn't it?
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he was carried there by indigenous guides after being
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: wounded during the French and Indian War. And by the
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: 19th century, those natural seeps in the ground had been
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: transformed into this massive booming resort industry. You had sprawling
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Victorian boarding houses, a bustling bottled water trade, and a
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: highly lucrative market for carbonic acid gas.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: And that carbonic acid gas is where the drama really
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: takes off. Because we need to paint a picture of
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: what this meant in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: This was the golden age of the soda fountain.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: Carbonation was incredibly valuable back then.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: It really was.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: So private wells and soda fountain companies figured out how
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: to extract the carbonation from Saratoga's water. And they just
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: started pumping the springs dry to feed the soda crates.
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: It became a completely unregulated race to the bottom. Literally.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Literally, yeah.
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: By the first decade of the 20th century, industrial steam
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: pumps were just running around the clock. The pumping was
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: winning and the natural springs were losing.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Think of the underground aquifer like a giant pressurized balloon
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: trapped beneath the rock. When you have 50 different private
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: soda companies all stabbing their own mechanical straws into it
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: and sucking as hard as they can, the pressure just collapses.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: It was a disaster.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: Right. A well on the east side of town would
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: suddenly run dry just because a factory on the west
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: side turned on a stronger pump. They were destroying the
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: very resource that put the town on the map in
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: the first place.
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: It triggered an absolute environmental and economic crisis for the region.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: The tourism industry was, you know, panicking. So in 1909,
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: Governor Charles Evans Hughes took a drastic step.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: What did he do?
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: He intervened and signed the springs into a state reservation.
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: And we have to be really clear about his motivation here.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: He didn't do this to build a lovely park with
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: picnic tables in the modern sense.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Not at all.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: He did it specifically so the soda fountain trade couldn't
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: finish the job of draining the aquifer. New York State
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: stepped in, bought the endangered land with public funds, and
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: capped the worst of the private pumps just to save
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: the water pressure.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: Wow. So the state reservation saves the water in 1909.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: But the architecture you actually walk past today belongs to
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: a whole different era.
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: Right, the 1930s.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Fast forward to the early 1930s. The Great Depression
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: has just gutted the economy. And Franklin Roosevelt is pushing
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: massive public works projects. He looks at this reserved land
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: in Saratoga. And decides to build a European-style hydrotherapy spa.
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: Using public money, right?
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Depression-era public money. Specifically from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation,
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: which was basically a giant federal credit card meant to
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: stimulate the economy and create jobs. And they built this
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: incredible complex that officially opened on July 26, 1935. The
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: scope of what they built is just staggering.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: I mean, this wasn't just a couple of wooden bathhouses
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: thrown up in the woods. It was a sprawling, coherent,
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: highly engineered medical campus. You had the Hollow Springs for promenading,
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: the Simon Baruch Research Institute for medical study, the Roosevelt
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: Baths for treatments, the Victoria Pool and a massive hotel.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: But the very last piece of that specific architectural puzzle
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: to be finished was the bottling plant.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: OK, let's unpack this because they used hospital sanitation standards
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: to build this place. So this wasn't just some rustic
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: pavilion where tourists could fill up a souvenir jug to
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: take home.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: Not at all. The state was in the business of
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: selling a highly regulated medical product. They were building a
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: sanitary facility to create and ship public health across the
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: entire country.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: That is so interesting.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: Twight James Baum designed the bottling plant, and he used
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: this really stately Georgian revival brick. For anyone trying to
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: picture it, think of those symmetrical brick buildings with grand
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: classical columns you often see on historic courthouses. Or university libraries.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Very official looking.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: Exactly. It was the exact same civic architectural language as
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: the bathhouses. It opened a month before the formal spa
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: in June 1935. Baum even included these massive Palladian windows,
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: those huge three-part arched windows that let in a tremendous
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: amount of natural sunlight.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: Which would have been crucial for a time before modern
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: fluorescent lighting. Right.
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: And they wanted the public to see just how pristine
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: and clean the bottling process was inside.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: The travel notes from Louis actually mention these workers called dippers.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: They would walk summer visitors through the humming plant, pouring
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: out little paper cups of the different waters, geyser, hawthorn, coesa,
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: and state seal.
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: It's quite an image.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: It really is. Try to visualize that contrast. You have
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: this pristine, sunlit, hospital-grade brick building echoing with the clinking
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: of glass bottles, shipping out natural medicine. And then you
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: walk into the Saratoga Automobile Museum today. You smell the
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: faint scent of motor oil and old rubber. Yeah. You
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: look down at your feet and you realize the ultimate
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: irony of where you are standing. That exact floor where
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: heavy sports cars are parked right now was engineered and
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: built to ship water.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: It is the one sentence most car museums in the
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: world absolutely do not get to use. That floor shipped water.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: And to understand how we got from glass bottles to
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: rubber tires, we have to look at the afterlife of
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: the spa. Yeah, because ultimately hydrotherapy lost the argument.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: Wait, I have to push back on something in the
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: notes here. I completely get how it lost to modern medicine.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: The rise of pharmaceuticals meant you could just swallow a
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: pill instead of taking a three-week medically supervised soak in
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: upstate New York. But the notes also say hydrotherapy lost
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: to airplanes. What do airplanes have to do with a
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: bottling plant?
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: It has everything to do with the logistics of leisure.
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: Before commercial aviation became cheap and accessible, if you lived
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: in New York City or Boston and you wanted a
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: wellness retreat, You took a train up to Saratoga.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense.
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: It was domestic regional tourism. But once the jet age arrived,
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: why would you take a train to a brisk upstate
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: New York bathhouse when you could hop on an affordable
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: flight to the warm beaches of Florida or the Caribbean
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: in a matter of hours?
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: Oh, wow. Yeah, I wouldn't.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: Right. The captive audience for these regional grand resorts just evaporated.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: And as the crowds thinned, the demand for the bottled
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: water plummeted. By 1970, the state's bottling line was bleeding
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: over $ 50, 000 a year.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: And the decline was shockingly fast. Once the bottom fell out,
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: New York State looked at the ledger, shut the plant
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: down in 1971, and basically just locked the doors and
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: walked away.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: Just abandoned it.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah. There was one brief gasp of life when a
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: private company called Waters of Saratoga Springs tried to revive
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: it in 1978. They managed to start bottling state seal
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: and geyser again in the fall of 1980, but the
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: economics were just brutal. They completely quit in less than
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: a year.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: So it just sat empty.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: Exactly. After 1981, this beautiful sunlit Georgian revival brick building
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: went completely dark. It sat there serving as nothing more
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: than glorified park storage until the year 2000. Well, the playlist.
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: Sleeping in the dark, the 2,379 acres around it were
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: rapidly evolving into something else. The reservation had to change
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: categories to survive. In 1962, it officially became Saratoga's boss
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: state park. In 1966, they opened the Saratoga Performing Arts Center,
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: known as SPOC on the north end, bringing in summer
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: concerts and the ballet. And then, crucially, the entire complex
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: earned a National Historic Landmark designation on February 27, 1987.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting. You have to pause
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: and think about the absurdity of that 1987 landmark status.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: The car museum didn't even exist yet. Right.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: It was just storage. Yeah.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: The federal government was literally looking at an empty, dark,
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: abandoned bottling warehouse being used to store lawnmowers and park benches.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: And they said, yes, this is a National Historic Landmark.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: The federal government didn't hand out that plaque because a
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: muscle car would eventually sit in the building?
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: Definitely not.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: The designation was awarded strictly because the state had saved
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: a mineral field in 1909 and built a totally coherent
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: Depression-era spa on it in 1935. The landmark is for
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: the springs and the architecture.
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: The rest of the campus found new life long before
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: the bottling plant did. The Washington Baths became the National
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: Museum of Dance. The Lincoln Baths transitioned to hold the
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: Children's Museum. The Roosevelt Baths still operate and sell a
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: soak today.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: But the bottling plant just sat there.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: Dark and empty for nearly two decades. And that extended
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: vacancy is the only reason the car museum fits here
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: without looking like a joke. The space was empty, the
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: floors were reinforced for heavy machinery, and the state had
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: already paid to save the beautiful brick exterior.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the rebirth. In 1998, a group
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: of local auto enthusiasts chartered the Saratoga Automobile Museum. The
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: state leased them this empty, dark plant in 2000.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: And they really transformed the inside.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: They did. They came in, put in a modern automotive lift,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: built out a two-level garage structure within the shell, but
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: they kept the original tile floors and those massive, tall
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: Palladian windows. They finally opened the public doors on June 1st, 2002.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: That's a great detail. And if you are using these
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: travel notes to plan your own trip, I want to
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: be extremely clear about something. There are only two floors
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: in this building, not three, just two floors of exhibits.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: The second floor upstairs tends to stay rooted in regional history.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: You'll find exhibits like racing in New York or east
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: of Detroit, reminding visitors that New York State actually used
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: to manufacture cars like Pierce Arrows and Franklins.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: Oh, really?
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: I didn't know that. Yeah, it's pretty neat. But the
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: ground floor, that original tile line bottling floor, is the
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: space that constantly rotates. And the rotating nature of that
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: ground floor is the ultimate proof that the building is
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: the main character of this story, not the vehicles parked
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: inside it.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: Louis details two very distinct visits in 2026 that perfectly
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: illustrate this point. Let's look at the January visit first.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: Louis walks into the museum and the ground floor is
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: hosting an exhibit called Pontiac. The Dawn of Muscle.
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: Oh, nice.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: The space is completely filled with firebirds, trans-ams, and classic GTOs.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: He writes about growing up around Pontiacs when they were
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: just boring family sedans and knowing the GTOs a ferocious
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: street reputation.
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: The curation of that January exhibit was attempting to capture
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: a very specific lightning-in-a-bottle moment. It wasn't just hollow nostalgia
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: for a brand that General Motors eventually killed off. The
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: exhibit was marking the exact historical moment in American engineering.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: When an automaker decided to take a midsize car... drop
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: an overwhelmingly massive engine under the hood, and create a
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: totally distinct category of automobile. It was a cultural date
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: stamp on a specific era of American life.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: But then we jump forward in the notes to June.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: Louis goes back to the exact same building.
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: And June presents a completely different automotive argument resting on
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: the exact same hospital-grade tile. The summer exhibit was Mercedes-Benz... 1886-2026.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: That's quite a shift. It's a huge shift. It was
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: a sweeping 140-year chronology of German engineering. You have classic,
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: refined Mercedes-Benz models filling the exact floor space where those
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: loud American muscle cars were sitting just five months earlier.
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: The exhibit tracked the history from the very first internal
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: combustion engines of Carl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler all the
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: way through to modern luxury.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: The notes explicitly point out that there is absolutely no
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: need to meticulously inventory the cars on the floor. Like,
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: Louis didn't write down every license plate or try to
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: memorize the specs of a German engine versus an American V8.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: The essence of the visit has nothing to do with
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: reciting horsepower statistics.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is how the room completely changed its personality.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: But the brick did not budge. You have these massive
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: tectonic shifts in automotive history, from blue-collar American muscle to
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: upper-crust German luxury rotating in and out of the space.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but they're just temporary guests.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: Exactly. They are rotating on the ground floor of a
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: bottling plant that New York State intervened to save in
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: 1909 and paid to build in 1935. The building can
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: effortlessly hold either story or any story, precisely because neither
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: one is the reason the walls exist in the first place.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: That reframing changes the entire way you experience a space.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for you when you
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: actually visit? How should you structure your day?
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: Well, the notes are very strict on this point.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: They really are. When you finish looking at the cars
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: and you walk out the front door, You have to
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: treat the plant as merely the first room of a
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: much larger house. You do not just get in your
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: car and drive away. You pull that map back out
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: and you start walking.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: Specifically, you want to follow the paths to the Gideon Putnam.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: This is the grand hotel that sits right there on
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: the reservation grounds. Marcus D. Reynolds designed it as a stately,
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: brick-and-column block that opened alongside the spa in 1935.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: But don't picture a modern luxury getaway with a swim-up bar.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: When it opened, it was essentially the overnight wing of
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: a sprawling medical campus. People came for strict three-week health regimens.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there was a mandatory dress code in the dining room,
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: and the healing baths were just a short prescribed walk
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: away through the trees.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Even if you don't book a room at the hotel,
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: and even if you don't take a mineral soak in
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: the Roosevelt baths, you really have to walk the grounds
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: to truly comprehend the scale of what the state actually built.
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: You have these sweeping graded walks, the towering pines providing
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: this dense canopy. and the magnificent Hall of Springs anchoring
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: the entire architectural composition.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: And if you happen to be walking there on a
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: warm summer night, the ambient noise of a live concert
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center just drifts right through
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: the trees.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: The overarching vision was to create a grand, European-style Baden-Baden.
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: For those unfamiliar, Baden-Baden was a legendary German spa town
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: where European royalty would go to take the waters and
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: promenade in high societies.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: And Roosevelt wanted to recreate that. Yes.
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: He wanted that grand European wellness culture, but executed entirely
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: on a New York public budget.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: The travel advice in Louis' notes lays out incredibly firm
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: geographical rules for your itinerary, which I think is vital.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: If you go to Saratoga, you must do the automobile
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: museum and the park walk on the same ticket stub
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: of time. Right.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: They share the same DNA. They belong to the exact
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: same narrative of the reservations.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: But there is a crucial boundary you have to respect.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: Do not mix up the spa history with the horse
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: racing history.
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely not.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: Union Avenue, which is where the National Museum of Racing
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: and Hall of Fame sits, is a completely different ticket
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: and should be a completely different Tuesday. Do not try
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: to smash thoroughbred horses and Pontiac engines into one single
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: afternoon visit as if the bottling plant somehow explains the
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: Traverse stakes.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: They are entirely separate civic stories built by different people
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: for different reasons.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: The notes even throw in a warning about Cooperstown and
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: the Baseball Hall of Fame, which is a completely different
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: drive altogether. You have to pick your geography and stay
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: mentally present in the specific narrative of the ground you
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: are standing on.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, the summary
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: of this entire day trip is a three-part timeline of survival. First,
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: the state intervened to save the water from the greedy
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: private pumps.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: Second, they used public money during a depression to build
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: a cohesive architectural spa campus.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: And third, they parked the cars inside the plant only
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: after the glass bottles were gone and the hydrotherapy era
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: had ended.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: They saved the water first, they built the spa second,
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: and they parked the cars third. If you only go
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: to stare at the cars, you are entirely missing the
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: foundation of the very floor you are standing on.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: This raises an important question, and it's a perspective I
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: hope everyone listening carries with them on their next trip. Mm-hmm.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: The next time you walk into a beautifully repurposed building,
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: whether it's a museum, a trendy food hall in an
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: old warehouse, or a boutique hotel in a former bank,
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: take a second before you look at the exhibits or
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: the menu.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, look down at the floor tiles. Look up at
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: the height and shape of the windows.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: Ask yourself, what completely different forgotten industry is hiding in
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: plain sight, just waiting for someone to ask why the
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: walls were built in the first place?
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: Such a powerful takeaway to end on, because sometimes the
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: reason you stop the car is just a temporary guest
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: living inside the real story. Thank you so much for
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: joining us on this edition of the Red Solo Traveler podcast.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: So the next time you find yourself turning off the
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: engine in a back lot, remember before you go inside,
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: open the map. Thank you.