Saratoga
Bathhouse

This place could be prosperous because this water has extraordinary value. Water so delicious that people filled bottles and shipped it across the country. Water so healing it drew visitors to grand hotels to bathe in it. Water for horses. Water for travelers, gamblers and athletes. Water so unique it built businesses, supported families, and helped shape the identity of an entire community.

One of Saratoga's physician-researchers, Dr. Grace Maguire Swanner, wrote that Saratoga's mineral waters were "equal, if not superior, to any in the world." Physicians studied the waters. Researchers measured their effects. Visitors arrived seeking relief from pain, arthritis, exhaustion, and the thousand invisible burdens carried by modern life.

In the early twentieth century, New York State undertook one of the most ambitious public wellness projects in American history. Inspired by the great spa traditions of Europe, planners, physicians, architects, and public leaders imagined an American counterpart worthy of standing beside the finest health resorts in the world.

The legislation that authorized the Spa described its purpose as creating "a state health resort and spa for use by the public."

This proposal seeks to continue that mission.

At its heart, this is a proposal to establish a modern public bathhouse at Saratoga Spa State Park and use it as the foundation for a broader wellness revival. The vision begins with the adaptive reuse of Roosevelt Bathhouse II as a public bathing facility featuring hot and cold pools, saunas, steam rooms, mineral water experiences, bodywork, movement, and wellness programming. From there, the plan expands carefully and deliberately, allowing each phase to prove itself before the next begins.

For more than twenty years, I have built Bodywork Professionals one client at a time. Every day, I work with people seeking relief from pain, stress, injury, and the ordinary wear of being human. Along the way, I learned something important: nobody buys a massage. They buy relief. They buy the ability to move more freely, sleep more deeply, and feel more at home in their own body.

People are hungry for places that help them feel better and feel connected, and the most successful wellness destinations in the world share one thing: they make people feel genuinely welcome, not just accommodated.

People will come to Saratoga Bathhouse to relax and reconnect. To spend time with friends and family. To slow down. To detox from the digital world. To restore themselves. To reorganize their pain into something lighter and more manageable. It's a tradition that has drawn people to these waters for generations.

As an Advanced Certified Rolfer, I have spent decades studying the connective tissue that binds the human body together. A body cannot be understood by examining one muscle in isolation. Everything isn't just connected; it's part of a whole.

I see the Saratoga Spa campus operating according to the same principle. The bathhouses, springs, hotel, theater, pools, forests, trails, and people form a single living organism. The challenge before us is not simply how to renovate individual buildings. The challenge is how to reestablish Saratoga Spa State Park as a regional wellness destination that blends arts, nature, family programming, and wellness.

I am a local businessman committed to making an impact on my community. My hope is to help create something that my five children may someday enjoy with their own children.

The following proposal is my best offering toward that possibility.

Roosevelt I is the intimate, couples-forward counterpart to Saratoga Bathhouse's public scale at Roosevelt II. Where Roosevelt II is built for volume and community access, Roosevelt I is built for presence: fewer guests, more time, more attention, at a price that reflects both.

Repositioning, Not Rebuilding

Roosevelt I already works. It has operated continuously since its 1935 renovation, and the business beneath it (local clientele, a working mineral bath tradition, a building that knows how to receive guests) is sound. I don't propose to reinvent it. I intend to extend its name and its essence forward, operating it in the same spirit it was built for, and to be the one who celebrates its hundredth anniversary in 2035 with that spirit intact.

What I bring is what it doesn't yet have: pure, undiluted mineral water, and a genuine leaning-into bodywork and massage as the building's defining strength rather than an amenity attached to it. The building's 42 historic tub rooms, largely unchanged since that 1935 renovation, transform gradually rather than all at once, in step with demonstrated demand: room count phases from 42 to 28 over five years, converted room by room as single-occupancy historic tubs give way to couples rooms built around large copper slipper tubs designed for two.

Pure Mineral Water

The defining change at Roosevelt I is the conversion of its hot water system to deliver pure, undiluted Saratoga mineral water, eliminating the current practice of blending in heated tap water to reach soaking temperature. Undiluted, the water carries its full natural carbonation, the same crystal clean effervescence eighteenth-century visitors once described as "brisk and sparkling like champagne."

Heating mineral water in its pure, undiluted form is not without engineering complexity. The same dissolved minerals that give Saratoga's water its character will, if heated directly against a conventional heating element, precipitate out and foul it, the same chemistry that forms the natural travertine deposits visible around the Park's springs today. The established solution is an indirect, shell-and-tube heat exchanger, in which the mineral water and the actual heat source stay physically separate, exchanging heat across a tube wall rather than through direct contact.

Food & Beverage

Light service is available throughout the visit rather than as a separate destination: fresh juices, Saratoga mineral water, wine and a small selection of light spirits, and seasonal small plates.

Staffing & Philosophy

Roosevelt I's staffing is not built from scratch: it is the direct extension of Bodywork Professionals' Saratoga practice into the building, bringing twenty years of training infrastructure and an in-house continuing-education program, The Bodywork Guild. The objective at Roosevelt I is not efficiency. It's presence: encouraging guests to slow down, linger, and fully inhabit the time they've set aside.

Roosevelt I and Roosevelt II represent the whole of my proposal but not the scope of my interest in the potential for the next chapter of Saratoga Spa State Park. The ideas that follow are different in kind: possibilities I want the Commission to have on record, not commitments I am making.

Washington Bathhouse

After a recent walkthrough of the building and a close read of its facility condition report, I am convinced of Washington Bathhouse's potential, and equally clear-eyed about the challenges that stand between that potential and reality.

Washington Bathhouse, in my view, should be the grand bathing experience: the largest-scale, most ambitious expression of what a Saratoga bathhouse can be, sized to host nearly twice the capacity of Saratoga Bathhouse itself. Sitting along Route 9, it is one of the first buildings a visitor encounters entering Saratoga Springs, positioned at the literal threshold of the city's identity as a spa town.

The building's own 2021 structural assessment recommends it remain unoccupied until its deficiencies are corrected. The damage is severe but specific: the first-floor elevated concrete slab and its supporting beams and columns require full removal and replacement. This is a serious, well-defined problem rather than a building in comprehensive failure. I recognize the scale of capital this building demands, and I have made the deliberate decision not to pursue it as part of this proposal.

If Washington Bathhouse were ever to become real, it would free Roosevelt II to become something more specialized: therapeutic programming in the clinical sense, or a family-forward water feature extending investments the Park has already made through the Children's Museum, the Creekside Classroom, and the Peerless Pool Complex. The Waldorf School of Saratoga Springs has expressed genuine interest in Washington Bathhouse as a possible campus location.

Gideon Putnam Hotel

I am not proposing to operate the Gideon Putnam Hotel. I raise the following because the Hotel and the bathhouses are natural partners: guests who stay at the Gideon Putnam are exactly the guests who would visit Saratoga Bathhouse. The Hotel's restaurant is worth reconsidering, health-forward, seasonal offerings would serve both Hotel guests and the broader park population, and that same kitchen could serve as catering infrastructure for events across the Park. Aaron Ditch, Regional Director of the YMCA of Saratoga, has confirmed he is open to discussing community access collaboration modeled on Saratoga Bathhouse's operating approach.