The Saratoga Arms: Embracing Racing with VIP Style

with L.A. Sokolowski

Ten years ago, a survey of 2,000 British parents asked what their kids’ Christmas lists to Santa looked like, and wanting a horse was the third-most popular request.

A lot more than ten years ago I was one of those kids, too.

Fortunately for my inner child (and yours), the Saratoga Arms Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, home to the summer jewel of the Thoroughbred racing crown and a century of “health, history, horses” was happy to encourage me and my His & Hers co-founder, Charles Joseph Berry, to unwrap – no waiting for sleigh bells -one of the finest vacation packages any would-be racehorse owner could dream of: The Off to the Races VIP Experience.

U.S. News & World Report ranked the independently owned Saratoga Arms the top hotel in the city in 2023. The me�culously restored Second Empire brick hotel was built in 1870 by Loren Putnam, the grandson of one of Saratoga’s earliest (1789) se�lers, Gideon Putnam, aka the ‘founding father’ of the region’s hotel industry.

The family name had been synonymous with good �ming before (Gideon’s first hotel a�empt proved its “Putnam’s Folly” label wrong). Loren opened his hotel seven years after the waging of the Ba�le of Ge�ysburg, and just as a casino-owning ex-boxer named John Morrissey introduced Saratoga to wagering, on eight races a day for four consecu�ve days.

Known over subsequent decades as The Putnam, Walton or Windsor, it was inherited in the 1950s by a Brooklyn woman, Alice Bode, who operated it as a rooming house un�l her passing in 1995. The bloom somewhat faded from its rose, the building was purchased in 1997 by Kathleen and Noel Smith (a descendant of another noteworthy New York figure, U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant), who oversaw its restora�on and renewal, including the addi�on of a now-signature showpiece, a bright and breezy wrap-around porch replete with white wicker. A�er another addi�on in 2005, the Saratoga Arms doubled its individual luxury guest rooms to 31.

Read more on page 70

U.S. News & World Report ranked the independently owned Saratoga Arms the top hotel in the city in 2023.