Art: Auction This Day

The most bodacious example in the U.S. of the plushy Victorian architecture variously known as jigsaw, gingerbread or General Grant, is the mammoth, decaying, 917-room United States Hotel at Saratoga Springs, N.Y.* Two years ago, the old “States” foundered in white-elephantine failure, closed its doors forever. Last week the entire furnishings of this ornament of an age went on the auction block. It was a great day for the fanciers of the art of the ’70s and ’80s.

The event attracted droves—townspeople, tourists, buyers from Texas and Michigan. They climbed the wide, stone front steps flanked by two enormous iron urns, to view the treasures inside: crystal-and-brass chandeliers, a heaving sea of mildewed objects, corniced walnut wardrobes, marble-topped bureaus—some 10,000 numbered items, stacked in the halls, standing in the serried, airless bedrooms. A dozen garlanded chinaware cuspidors clustered beside a bundle of lace curtains. Metal Indians and painted washstands stood on the vast drawing-room floor, while a gleeful Saratoga schoolboy banged at a bandy-legged grand piano. Love’s Tribute and Love’s Stratagem leaned in steel engraving against a parlor wall. There were objects nobody could explain, such as a waisthigh, samovar-like receptacle of tarnished silverplate sporting an impudent spiggot. There were even sales tickets on the coiled hempen ropes down which no one had ever had to make a fire escape.

Heroic Ugliness. Horn-rimmed Auctioneer Harry Loree moved from bedroom to bedroom, followed by a herd of bidders. In each room he mounted a chair, addressed his audience in machine-gun auctionese: “I have eight dollars bid for the pier-mirror eight dollars eight dollars eight dollars SOLD to what’s the name please?” Prices were middling: $25 for most of the marble-topped dressers, $3 to $50 for figured carpets, $20 apiece for twin brass beds. One of the 888-ft. long red Axminster carpets from a hallway brought $1, 600. For the two florid front-lawn urns a dealer paid $50, for an unsigned Hudson River School painting, $50.

Such prices were not unimpressive considering that in the ‘703 U.S. architecture and furniture design fell on its ugliest days. Had the United States Hotel been furnished 20 years sooner it would have caught the end of the gracious early-Victorian style—and its contents would have brought untold sums last week. As it was, few collectors and decorators wanted the garish brocades and machine-carved chair-and-sofa sets on the auction block. Records showed that most of this fusty flotsam had come from Manhattan’s great A. T. Stewart department store, predecessor to John Wanamaker’s. But no records showed who had designed the pieces or the hotel itself. One guess was that the hotel’s builder—one Seymour Ainsworth—had styled his building by the contractor’s sample book, simply slapping, on brackets, gables, machine-cut wooden columns and arches.

Valet and Valise. Loree’s perambulating auction attracted a few elderly Saratogians who remembered the hotel’s glory. Saratoga’s registers have borne such names as Ulysses S. Grant, Martin Van Buren, Chester A. Arthur, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, John Wanamaker, Chauncey Depew, August Belmont, William C. Whitney. The princely Dick Canfield, King of Gamblers, presided over his own “clubhouse” which still stands in Saratoga’s Congress Park. Diamond Jim Brady sat on the United States’ colossal piazza watching the noonday fashion parade on Saratoga’s Broadway. Onlookers saw such devastating showpieces as Lillian Russell and Delia Fox twirling their parasols to the airs of Strauss waltzes rendered by a band in the hotel’s garden courtyard. In the lobby the late great dandy Evander Berry Wall might have been seen registering: Wall and Valet. Not to be outdone by such flourishes, one millionaire horse-breeder signed in: White Hat McCarty and Valise.

During the 1920’s and ’30’s the United States Hotel continued to prosper with the August seasons of the Saratoga Association for the Improvement of the Breed of Horses. But big-purse racing has now deserted Saratoga. In 1943 the “States” fell to the town for $38,000 (original cost was almost $1,000,000). Last week’s auction was a prelude to the building’s swan song: Saratoga rumor was that it would soon be torn down.

*The U.S. public will get a last look at the United States Hotel in all its glory when Warner’s Saratoga Trunk, starring Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper, is released, probably next spring.