The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [185]
Canfield’s Casino was a square, mansionlike building located down in a green, shady park where the Congress Spring (one of the town’s many old mineral water fountains) had formerly been the main attraction. The Casino had actually been built by another famous gambler, John Morrissey, a burly Irish prizefighter and Tammany tough who’d made use of his winnings to set himself up in the gaming room and horse track businesses (Morrissey’d also built Saratoga’s first track). During the construction in 1870-1871 of what’d then been known as “the Club House,” Morrissey’d pumped every Italianate luxury he could think of into the place, and it’d done a booming business from the start. It hadn’t been enough, though, to net Morrissey the prize he wanted most: acceptance by the society types who came to fritter their dollars away by the thousands in his establishment. He’d died in 1878, and ownership of the joint had passed around to various second-rate operators for a time, until it was bought and refurbished in 1894 by its current owner, Richard Canfield.
Canfield, like Morrissey, had made a personal fortune in the gambling trade, though he didn’t have the thug’s past what’d kept Morrissey from ever being treated like a true gentleman. Having run gaming houses in Providence, Rhode Island, and then in New York, Canfield had spent his spare time (and a short prison term) turning himself into a kind of self-taught scholar and art critic. When he took over Morrissey’s Club House, he put all his learning to work, filling the joint with top-of-the-line furniture and art, building a big new gourmet dining room, and hiring one of the most famous French chefs in the world to cook for his patrons. And by refusing to allow women and kids to play at his tables, he’d even outsmarted the reformers who, for a short time during his early days of operation, had tried to shake things up in Saratoga and had actually succeeded in getting a lot of other, smaller houses closed down. At the same time, though, Canfield had built said women and children a nice big lounge where they could amuse themselves with ices and entertainments—and tell their husbands and fathers what bets to put down for them.
The park around the Casino was a suitable setting for all this luxurious recreation, with its fountains, pools, statues, and handsome trees lining the walkway to the ivy-covered walls of the three-story Casino. We entered the building that night through the front door, the detective sergeants noting with relief that Mr. Canfield was one of the few gaming house and hotel operators in Saratoga who didn’t hang a “Jewish Patronage Not Solicited” sign outside his establishment. Once in, we found ourselves in a large, crowded, and thickly carpeted lobby what was just outside the public gaming room. Inside this room the stakes were low (white chips went for a dollar, red for five, blue for ten, yellow for a hundred, and brown for a thousand) compared to what went on in the private rooms upstairs, where everything was multiplied by a hundred.
Antsy as I was to start playing, I have to confess that I was even more anxious, that night, to meet the man who was famous everywhere