Built on the Boom: How Chasing Fads Made America's Most Durable Towns

Saratoga Springs, New York did not become one of the most recognizable resort destinations in American history because it was prudently managed. It became what it is because, for roughly a century beginning in the 1820s, it was the precise location where each successive wave of national obsession chose to break. The mineral springs came first, drawing invalids and their physicians. Then came the hotels, which drew the wealthy. The wealthy drew the gamblers. The gamblers drew the horse racing. Each new enthusiasm arrived before the previous one had fully exhausted itself, and the infrastructure built for one purpose turned out to be serviceable for the next.

Saratoga is an extreme example, but the pattern it illustrates is not exceptional. It is, in fact, one of the more reliable templates in American urban development—a template that rewards communities willing to make large, fast, poorly-hedged bets on whatever the nation happens to be excited about at a given moment.

The Mineral Spring and the Medical Imagination

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced a remarkable number of American spa towns, most of them now forgotten, a handful of them still functioning in some form. The therapeutic logic behind mineral springs was essentially pre-scientific—a belief that waters containing dissolved minerals could cure or prevent a range of ailments that medicine of the period could not otherwise address. The belief was not entirely without foundation; certain mineral compositions do have measurable physiological effects. But the scale of the cultural investment in spa culture vastly exceeded anything the evidence could support.

Communities that happened to sit atop sulfurous or ferrous springs understood, with varying degrees of sophistication, that they possessed something the market would pay for. The development model was straightforward: build a hotel, advertise the waters, attract a clientele wealthy enough to spend a season away from home, and then use that clientele's presence to attract commerce, entertainment, and secondary visitors who came not for the waters but for the company.

What is striking about this model, viewed from the present, is how little it depended on the actual therapeutic value of the springs. The waters were the occasion, not the product. The product was the social experience of being in a place where fashionable people gathered. Once that experience became self-sustaining—once Saratoga or White Sulphur Springs or Bedford Springs had achieved sufficient critical mass of distinguished visitors—the springs themselves became almost incidental. The fad had built something that outlasted the fad.

The World's Fair and the Permanent Infrastructure

The world's fair is perhaps the purest expression of the boom-town dynamic in American history. Between 1876 and 1940, American cities competed aggressively for the right to host international expositions, spending sums that would be extraordinary even by contemporary standards, on the explicit promise that the investment would be repaid through tourism, commerce, and lasting urban improvement.

The promise was almost never fulfilled in the terms in which it was made. World's fairs routinely lost money for their host cities. The tourists came and left. The exhibits were dismantled. The famous White City of the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition—that gleaming demonstration of American urban ambition—burned within two years of closing.

And yet Chicago in 1900 was a fundamentally different city than Chicago in 1890, in ways that had everything to do with what the fair had built and almost nothing to do with what the fair had earned. The parkland along the lakefront, the transit infrastructure, the hotels, the cultural institutions that had been established to impress international visitors—all of it remained. The fair had been a fad. The physical city it produced was not.

This pattern repeated itself across the American fair circuit. St. Louis used the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition to construct Forest Park, which remains one of the largest urban parks in the country. San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition left behind the Palace of Fine Arts, still standing and still in use. Buffalo's 1901 Pan-American Exposition was a financial catastrophe that is now remembered almost exclusively because President McKinley was assassinated there—and yet the Delaware Park system that Frederick Law Olmsted designed as its backdrop has served the city continuously for more than a century.

The mechanism at work here is not difficult to identify. The fair justified, politically and financially, investments in public infrastructure that could not have been authorized on their own merits. The fad was the permission structure. The infrastructure was the durable residue.

The Railroad Junction and the Manufactured Necessity

Railroad towns represent a more complicated version of this dynamic, because the railroad was not precisely a fad—it was a genuine technological transformation that reorganized the American economy with a thoroughness no previous innovation had achieved. But the specific communities that captured railroad junctions were, in many cases, the beneficiaries of contingency rather than geographic logic.

The junction town—the place where two or more rail lines crossed—occupied a position of structural importance that had little to do with any pre-existing advantage. Junctions were established by railroad company decisions that reflected engineering constraints, land acquisition opportunities, and the personal interests of investors. A town that found itself at a junction in 1860 was, through no particular merit of its own, suddenly the most important place within a radius of fifty miles. It attracted repair yards, warehouses, hotels, and the full complement of commercial activity that follows from being the place where things stop and change direction.

Many of these towns made the same mistake: they assumed the junction was permanent, and they built civic institutions—courthouses, colleges, opera houses—scaled to a future that the railroad company had no obligation to deliver. When lines were consolidated, routes shifted, or the railroad itself declined, the junction town discovered that it had built for a fad as surely as any spa town had.

But some of them had built well enough, and diversified quickly enough, that the physical and institutional infrastructure they had assembled during the boom proved capable of attracting the next wave of economic activity. The railroad town that became a regional commercial center, or a college town, or a light manufacturing hub, did so not despite having bet on a fad but because the fad had given it enough capital—physical, financial, and social—to survive the fad's end.

What Volatility Produces

The conventional account of American economic development tends to favor stability. The community that builds on solid agricultural foundations, that develops diversified industry, that avoids the boom-bust cycle—this is the community that the textbooks hold up as the model of sustainable prosperity.

The historical record is considerably more ambiguous. Many of the communities that pursued this model of steady, diversified development are now small, declining, and largely invisible to the national conversation. Many of the communities that bet extravagantly on mineral springs, world's fairs, oil booms, and railroad junctions are thriving cities.

The reason is not that volatility is better than stability. It is that volatility, at scale, produces infrastructure—physical, institutional, and cultural—that stability alone rarely justifies. The boom town builds the hotel that becomes the convention center. It builds the rail yard that becomes the industrial park. It builds the grand boulevard that becomes the tourist attraction. The stable agricultural community builds what it needs and no more, and what it needs is rarely enough to attract the next wave of growth.

This is a finding that human communities have been arriving at and ignoring for as long as they have existed. The psychological appeal of the boom—of the moment when everyone can see that something important is happening here—is not simply greed or naivety. It is the recognition, usually accurate, that large collective investments require large collective enthusiasms to authorize them, and that large collective enthusiasms are, by their nature, temporary.

The towns that understood this, consciously or not, built during the enthusiasm and survived the aftermath. The towns that waited for a more rational justification often waited too long.

The Fad That Kept Working

Saratoga Springs still hosts thoroughbred racing every August. The crowds are smaller than they were in the Gilded Age, and the mineral springs are now a state park rather than a medical destination, but the town functions. The infrastructure that the successive enthusiasms built—the hotels, the track, the downtown commercial district—has proven more durable than anyone betting on it in 1870 had any right to expect.

That durability is the argument. Not that chasing fads is wise, but that the things fads build sometimes outlast the wisdom of the people who built them.