World-famous as the Queen of Spas, Saratoga Springs entered a golden age in the Victorian years and the world flocked to its doorstep every summer. The rich and famous rubbed elbows with a growing post-Civil War middle class popularizing a new concept, the summer vacation. They came ostensibly to take the waters at the bubbling mineral springs, but what they really came for was to see and be seen on the grand piazzas of the magnificent, colossal hotels that lined Saratoga's Broadway, and to share in the limelight of glittering balls and fabulous parties.The grace and opulence of America's Victorian era faded with the dawn of the twentieth century, and almost all of the buildings and views in this book have long since disappeared in clouds of dust from the wrecker's ball or in spectacular cataclysmic infernos, but in Saratoga Lost, Robert Joki takes the reader on a guided tour of that grand era with hundreds of historic photographs from the author's extraordinary private collection, complemented, by period artwork.