To celebrate its 60th anniversary, Golf Digest published a list of America's "Most Important Courses" by decade in its November 2010 issue. These are the courses, according to the mag, that have had the biggest impact on the game since the late 19th century.
Rich in golf history, Long Island and the New York metropolitan area are featured prominently in the list. Shinnecock Hills, Long Island's oldest representative on the list, was the first 18-hole course to host a U.S. Open (1896). One year prior, the course at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx opened as the country's first municipal layout and eventually pioneered new ideas like advance tee times.
Only one public golf destination in Nassau or Suffolk is recognized by Golf Digest. Not surprisingly, that destination is Bethpage, a park and four-course golf facility built from an estate in the 1930s and completed as a public-works project following the Depression. The existing Lenox Hills Country Club was modified and reborn as Bethpage's Green Course. By 1936, a new clubhouse and the Blue, Red and Black courses made their debut thanks to the efforts and contributions put forth by victims of the economic times.
Golf Digest's Ron Whitten writes:
"Robert Moses, the larger-than-life Commissioner of Parks for the City of New York, envisioned "The People's Country Club," a four-course complex of public golf courses at Bethpage that would employ thousands of unemployed. He got it done in record time (a fifth course was added in 1958). Fans of A.W. Tillinghast still find it hard to accept that park superintendent Joseph H. Burbeck was primarily responsible for the layouts and that Tillinghast, brought on as a consultant, left the project in a dispute before Bethpage's famed Black Course was completed. But Tillinghast himself wrote that the idea of making the Black Course as a fearsome public Pine Valley was not his, but Burbeck's." -- Golf Digest, November 2010
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