ARCHIVE| Life at the San: Saranac Lake, 1937
Posted by Ed on March 3, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Looking southeast on Saranac Lake’s Main Street toward the Harrietstown Town Hall, 1937. This view looks nearly identical today.
Though I tend to write quite a lot about Lake Placid, I also harbor a deep affection for its neighbor, Saranac Lake, the Little City of the Adirondacks.
First settled by the Moody family, who came west from Keene, New Hampshire in 1819, the Saranac Lake we know today largely grew up around the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium, a cure center for consumptives founded by Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau in 1884. Spending long periods of time outside, even in the coldest hours of winter, was Trudeau’s chief prescription for those seeking to cure.
Trudeau, born in 1848 in New York and educated at Columbia, contracted tuberculosis in 1873. To quell his disease, he moved north to the clear, cold air of the Adirondacks. By 1876, he was well enough to start a medical practice that eventually became what everyone in town still calls “the San.”
Trudeau doctors inspect tubercular lungs, 1937.
The hospital’s beginnings were modest. “Little Red,” the cottage that housed the first two patients, two sisters from New York, is preserved on the grounds of the Trudeau Institute. But Trudeau’s practice, and the village with it, grew quickly. Robert Louis Stevenson was a patient in 1887. By 1915, when Trudeau died, the San was a sprawling campus that included a number of cure cottages, a post office, a chapel dining facilities and so on. Other sanatoriums were constructed in neighboring Ray Brook and Gabriels, and the Will Rogers Hospital was built in Saranac Lake in 1927. But demand for the cure was such that hundreds of private “cure cottages” opened across Saranac Lake. The village’s entire economy centered around its position as a health resort.
After World War II, however, with the advent of Penicillin and other treatments, sanatoriums fell out of favor. The San, renamed for Trudeau on his death, closed in 1954. Larry Doyle, a baseball star on the New York Giants in the 1910s and 1920s, was its final patient. He stayed in Saranac Lake and died in 1974 at age 87. The Trudeau family stayed too. Trudeau’s grandson, Dr. Francis B. Trudeau, Jr., sold the San property in 1957 to the American Management Association, which retains ownership today. In 1964, he opened the Trudeau Institute on Lower Saranac Lake. It is a world-renowned biomedical research center. Frank Trudeau died in 1995; his son, Garretson Beekman Trudeau, is the creator of “Doonesbury.”
For more on the history of the Little City, visit Historic Saranac Lake.
Berkeley Square at the intersection of Main Street and Broadway, Saranac Lake, 1937
Here, though, is Saranac Lake in 1937. These photos, from the Life Archive, were shot by the prolific Alfred Eisenstaedt for a story that was published in the magazine’s Nov. 29, 1937 issue. Titled “Tuberculosis: A Menace and a Mystery,” the piece explored the treatment of the disease in Saranac Lake. A number of Saranac Lake icons are here: There are shots of a WNBZ broadcast, a woman sitting a recliner no doubt from Fortune’s reading the Enterprise, Little Red, the Harrietstown Town Hall and the Hotel Saranac, Berkeley Square and so on.
I’ve harvested 96 images, so be sure to scroll through to see them all:
