Damon Runyon

Springfield Republican/July 22, 1937

Saratoga Springs, New York, July 22— Many of the permanent inmates of this quaint little old town in the foothills of the Adirondacks have moved, or are making ready to move, to temporary habitation for the next 30 days.

It is a curious hegira that has been taking place here annually for upward of 75 years. The horse racing season opens in Saratoga next week and it is the custom of the Saratogians to rent their homes for the period of the races to the visitors.

Some visitors have rented the same homes for 20 years or more. Some take a different house every season according to the changing family requirements for space, and also perhaps according to the changing family purse. We know Saratoga visitors who have occupied 10 different houses in as many years.

The rental prices vary with reference to the size and desirability of the home and the location. The visitors refer to all houses as “cottages.” You can get a small comfortable house for $250, which is about the minimum, or one of the size of an orphan asylum, and not so comfortable, for $3000.

The highest rental we ever hoard of here was $10,000 for a most elaborate farm house just outside the city limits. Wo would guess that the average rental for a nice home is around $700, which probably goes far toward standing off the annual upkeep for the owner.

The rich old racing families, like the various branches of the Whitneys, own their houses in Saratoga, which in many cases have come down to the present generation from a racing ancestry that flourished in the great days when the California mining millionaires brought their horses here to compete against the East and the South, and when “the spa” was the seat of American fashion and frivolity.

The rich keep their Saratoga houses closed and in charge of caretakers for all but the month of August. Just now there is a great flurry of activity around these houses, with automobiles discharging cargoes of servants and with a terrific airing out and dusting up going on against the arrival of the owners.

These houses of the rich are not especially elaborate, save perhaps in size. They are furnished no more expensively and in some cases not half as comfortably as the average upstate home of a family in fair circumstances. From the old days of great display, Saratoga has changed to a place of almost ostentatious simplicity on the part of the rich. It is our guess that the rich feel they are more or less rusticating here.

There is nothing complicated about renting a house for the season in Saratoga, except digging up the required dough. You just get hold of a real estate agent, tell him exactly what you want, and how much you are disposed to pay, and the chances are he will have your house in four hours.

You do not have to bother even to come to Saratoga in advance, though unless you are experienced in house renting here, and are familiar with locations, it is not a bad idea to look around. In general, however, a Saratoga real estate agent is unlikely to stick you with a bad bargain.

He wants your business and your recommendation another season.

He will dig up a cook and any other help you require, and the cook is apt to be one of these upstate, middle-aged lady cooks who can do more tricks about a cook stove than Cardini with a pack of pasteboards. Those cooks average around $20 per week for the month, but when a transient reflects that he is perhaps depriving some worthy husband of the magnificent benefits of her culinary arts for that length of time, the wage seems little enough. This renting out of houses in Saratoga for the racing season has become so systematized that about all a visitor has to do is notify the agent of the day of his arrival, and, lo and behold, his house will be all ready and a piping hot dinner spread as he steps across the threshold.

He does not have to bother about the tradespeople, or the delivery of the daily papers, or much of anything else. The original occupants of the house remove only their personal belongings, and if they show up at all during the tenure of the visitor will be found in the main friendly and helpful.

We have often wondered where these Saratogians go after they rent out their houses. We have a vague theory that they probably move in with in-laws somewhere around town, or perhaps the surrounding hills, but we were not quite sure about that and it worried us.

We hated to think of some of these nice people wandering about without habitation in August while some stranger enjoyed the comforts of their homes, so we asked a householder about this the other day.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll tell you. I take a nice little vacation. I go to a hotel.”