kursaal

plural kursaals · alternative Kursaal

1. A public hall or building for the use of visitors at health resorts or spas; a casino

   Kursaal is a German word for casino, and a cosmopolitan term that became popular in the Belle Epoque.

   [2001, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture—Mies van der Rohe Award, Digitized edition (Architecture), Fundació Mies van der Rohe, published 2007

   3 more examples

   It was not the polished serenity of fashionable kursaals, the impassive languor of aristocratic gaming-tables, the self-destruction taken with a light word, of the salles of Baden, of Homburg, of Monaco; it was gambling in all its unreined fever, […]

   1871, Ouida, Chandos, Reprint edition (Fiction), Elibron, published 2001, →ISBN, page 343

   Use your eyes, man. Look at the Kursaal, its luxuries, its gardens, its gilding, its attractions, all of them cheap, except the one that pays for all; all these delights, and the rents, and the croupiers, and the servants, and the income and liveries of an unprincipled prince, who would otherwise be a poor but honest gentleman with one bonne, instead of thirty blazing lackeys, all come from the gains of the bank, which are the losses of the players, especially of those that have got a system.

   1877, Charles Reade, chapter V, in A Woman-Hater

   Having brought it to a close, he took his way to the Kursaal. The great German watering-place is one of the prettiest nooks in Europe, and of a summer evening in the gaming days, five-and-twenty years ago, it was one of the most brilliant scenes.

   1879, Henry James, chapter III, in Confidence, London: Chatto & Windus