To Be Seen

Saratoga draws roughly a million people a summer. Most of them come for the scene. The horses pay for it.

The crowd comes for the hats.

That is not a slight. It is the business model. Saratoga Race Course pulls something on the order of a million people across its summer meet, and the New York Racing Association knows precisely what it is selling. (Its own copy for Travers Day sells “extravagant fashion, raucous crowds, and superstars,” a day no one is permitted to miss.) There is a Best in Pink fashion contest. There are fascinators built by hand. There is breakfast on the Clubhouse Porch at dawn, served to spectators while the horses train in front of them.

This is old. In 1863, a month after Gettysburg, a casino owner named John Morrissey ran the first thoroughbred meet on the grounds. The New York Times described the grandstand that summer as a “superb array of beauty and fashion,” the equal of Ascot or Goodwood. The town has sold the same product ever since: the spring waters, the social whirl, the prettiest track in the country. Health, history, and horses, in that order, which also h…