"Business as usual": Tallgrass will remain open through summer, per Newsday

Not only is Tallgrass Golf Course consistently high on Golfweek "Best" lists, it's also notoriously tops in perseverance. 

The Shoreham course will stay open through the summer, according to Newsday's Mark Herrmann, as delays in applications and approvals have pushed back the start date for the solar farm -- formally Shoreham Solar Commons -- that is slated to replace it.

"It's business as usual," Tallgrass pro Larry Menne told Newsday.

Previously, word of a spring closing spread via sources at and close to the course that renowned architect Gil Hanse designed in 2000.  Tallgrass management went so far as to distribute an e-mail in April urging golfers to use gift cards on golf fees and merchandise soon before the course went out of business.  Development talks have long dogged the Shoreham layout -- in 2008, course ads announced that Tallgrass was "here to stay" after fighting off a similar threat.

Menne told Newsday that traffic is down given the uncertainty around the course: 

Golfers are few at a facility that hosted more than 27,000 rounds last year and has regularly been named in Golfweek magazine’s list of “top courses you can play” in New York State. Potential customers have heard either that Tallgrass is closing or has closed. In many cases, they heard it from Tallgrass employees, based on information from the prospective new owners.

“Last summer, they were saying they would be in construction April 1. As far as this year, we thought we were dead in the water,” course administrator Harry Swanson said. “So we gave away all our bookings. We canceled our tournaments. As for the members, we had to tell them to be fair to them. So we lost all the members. We lost all the catering events, the parties.” -- Mark Herrmann, Newsday, 5/18/2016

A Golf On Long Island reader visited Tallgrass last month and detailed the hard, lightning-fast greens in play this spring.  (Tallgrass has said in e-mails that they will not aerate greens this spring.)

For more on Tallgrass, check out the course flyover, or for a chronology of the solar-farm threat, see this post.