First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Coney Island
by: Sterngass, Jon

Hardcover. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket. 374 pages, b&w photos. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. "At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Saratoga Springs hosted no more than a thousand hardy travelers yearly, Newport floundered in the midst of a fifty-year commercial decline, and Coney Island's beach resembled a wind-swept wilderness. A hundred years later, the number of summer visitors to Saratoga had increased a hundredfold, the antics of high society at Newport transfixed America, and at least five million pleasure seekers visited Coney annually. 'Those who talk of the mushroom growth of our Western cities,' declared an astounded writer for Harper's Weekly in 1878, 'might better spend their wonder and enthusiasm upon our Eastern watering-place.'" -- From the Introduction. Fifty-nine illustrations enliven Sterngass's unique study of the commodification of pleasure that occurred as capitalist values flourished, travel grew more accessible, and leisure time became democratized.