Time is up in Uniondale, where the New York Islanders have played their final games as Nassau residents and will now head west to build on their history in Brooklyn. When the clock hit zero earlier this week, a longtime fixture in the county’s “Hub” became a thing of the past.
It is not the first time that a club left the Hub for greener pastures. The Meadow Brook Club was an 18-hole course that for four decades was part of a central Nassau landscape that consisted almost entirely of airfields and golf holes.
The former Mitchel Field occupied land that today is home to Hofstra University, Nassau Community College and the Nassau Coliseum. Bordering its runways to the east was Meadow Brook. The club’s history dates to 1881, a time when fox hunting and polo reigned supreme. Meadow Brook had the opportunity to be remembered as the cradle of Long Island golf, if only its members had been quicker to come around on the European sport. A demonstration in the late 1880s by British amateur and golf writer Horace Hutchinson left them less than impressed, wrote William Quirin in America’s Linksland. A quarter century passed before the club built itself a full 18-hole course. Shinnecock Hills in Southampton instead became the birthplace of local golf in 1891.
During the golf boom of the 1920s, Meadow Brook was joined by the Salisbury Golf Club, which featured as many as five courses -- three public, two private, with separate clubhouses for public players and club members -- during its run and was located directly across Merrick Avenue to the east. Coldstream Golf Club, built on the "Brookholt" estate in East Meadow, was Meadow Brook’s southern neighbor.
[ABOVE (click to enlarge): A 1930s aerial photo shows Mitchel Field with the original Meadow Brook Club on its eastern border. Salisbury Golf Club (today's Eisenhower Park) is in the bottom right corner. South of Meadow Brook in the bottom left is Coldstream Golf Club. (Photo courtesy of VanderbiltCupRaces.com - The Howard Kroplick Collection). BELOW: Salisbury #4 was the only golf course to survive the eventual development and suburbanization of today's Hub area. It lives on as Eisenhower Park's Red Course.]
Unfortunately that golf-heavy landscape on the Hempstead Plains had trouble standing up to changing times. Four of the five Salisbury courses were lost during and after World War II – the lone survivor was Salisbury #4, where Walter Hagen won the 1926 PGA Championship. It remains popular today as Eisenhower Park’s Red Course. Coldstream was used as a military camp during the war.
Amid the post-war rush to suburbia, Meadow Brook found itself in perilous position – it occupied valuable ground directly between the Northern State Parkway and Jones Beach. By 1953 the land was in the hands of Robert Moses and New York State, and a long-discussed extension of the Meadowbrook Parkway was built through the heart of the property. The club was able to relocate to Jericho, where it would go on to host LPGA and Senior Tour events on new grounds, but the original course itself had no way to escape.
[An earlier version of this story was published in the April/May issue of Networking Magazine. Golf On Long Island's photo-history book -- Images of America: Long Island Golf, by Arcadia Publishing -- will be available June 1.]
