The spring of 1936 arrived like the many seasons of rebirth that preceded it, though in the minds of Long Island's golfers, it undoubtedly felt like the dawn of a new era.
Less than a year earlier, the A.W. Tillinghast-designed Red and Blue courses opened at the sprawling new Bethpage State Park complex, whetting the appetite of golfers near and far, especially those of modest means. Not only did Bethpage announce the arrival of golf accessible to the masses, it also represented progress and promise at a time when clubs and courses were disappearing from view amid Depression-era hardship.
That spring would also be the last that local players welcomed a new season without Bethpage's Black Course as the centerpiece of Long Island golf. For a very brief period, 80 years ago today, Bethpage golf consisted only of the Green, Red and Blue courses.
The Green Course predated Bethpage State Park itself, first appearing on the scene in 1923 as the Lenox Hills Golf Club, a Devereux Emmet design within the massive Benjamin Yoakum estate. A decade later, New York State acquired Yoakum’s land and began operating Lenox Hills as the public Green. "When the State took over the Yoakum estate and planned a country club for the people," described the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, "golf was given its rightful place, and for the first time on fashionable Long Island the man who is not a millionaire will have a chance on first-class golf links."
Tillinghast's Blue Course followed in April 1935, a month ahead of the Red Course. The "People's Country Club accommodates 1,500 players a day and is the last word in swank," said the Eagle shortly before the Red's official debut. It continued, Bethpage "aims to accomplish for golf what Jones Beach has done for saltwater bathing."
In its profile of the new golf destination, the paper described elements that modern players surely would find humorous -- talk of thin rough, benign bunkers and fast, streamlined play closely supervised by active rangers. "At Bethpage, no sluggish group of players is allowed to block traffic."
While Bethpage's original three led thousands of players around their fairways, the Black sat unfinished, awaiting its May 1936 debut. A 1935 aerial photo (left) shows a polo match in progress on what would soon become the Black's opening hole. Nearby, construction continues on the Black, still months away from its grand entrance into Bethpage and America’s celebrated golf landscape.
[This article also appears in the April 2016 issue of Networking Magazine.]
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