Street names can give clues about a community's past. That's especially true with golf courses. When Long Island streets are tagged with golf-related terms, it often means that buried beneath sidewalks and front lawns are the remains of a long-forgotten (or fondly remembered) course.
This series of posts will look back at courses that have been gone for decades, some close to a century, and whose presence is only marked by what developers scratched on road maps and signs. To see other courses in the "Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past" series, click the links at the bottom of the post.
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Unlike the courses previously covered in this street-name series, this lost layout is not memorialized with a variety of basic golf terms or a roster of its era's most renowned players. The only remaining clue to the Valley Stream Country Club's brief existence in southwest Nassau County is a short, curved residential street called Fairway Road.
Nearly 90 years ago, the site of today's Fairway Road was at the center of one of the few Long Island courses to take its first swing in the midst of the Great Depression. Valley Stream Country Club, bordered by the recently built Southern State Parkway to the south and Franklin Avenue to the west, opened for play as a private facility in 1931.
In spite of the economic realities of the time, the club seemed hopeful that enough optimism lingered from the 1920s golf boom to buoy the club through its infancy. It fired at the pin right away, immediately billing itself as "a superior golf course for the discriminating." Its unofficial slogan used in several newspaper ads read "Equal to any -- superior to most" -- surely a bold statement for a new Long Island club playing in the shadow of famed Gold Coast and South Shore stalwarts.
Joseph Kantor designed the 6,450-yard course on a relatively small parcel alongside the parkway. In a May 1932 description of the course, Ralph Trost of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle -- a writer who chronicled the trajectory of many of the Island's courses in the 1920s and 1930s -- used a meandering comparison to Scottish golf to describe Valley Stream as undersized and flat, though in a good way. He said the flat ground allowed Kantor to build tame bunkers that "look extraordinarily formidable" and "awe-inspiring" from afar. The sandy base allowed interesting holes to be constructed, Trost said, including the third hole with a water carry over an artificial hazard where soil had been excavated to build up other parts the course.
Within a year, with the world economy in freefall, Valley Stream softened its boastful approach and instead rebranded itself as a safe, welcoming haven for those still able to use golf as a real-world diversion. "Have you had to give up golf?" started one 1932 ad. "The quality of membership is to be unimpaired, but if you have been hard hit and want a real golf club that you can afford, write us today." Still, the soothing tone was not meant to distract from the club's true purpose. Two weeks later, a similar ad read, "This is NOT a public course."
And so it went through the 1930s, a volatile time for even the most respected and renowned golf clubs on Long Island, let alone a newcomer obscured by Lido, Seawane and other nearby courses. This was an era when the Daily Eagle, in 1933, printed a series of obituaries for the Engineers Club in Roslyn -- home of the 1919 PGA Championship and 1920 U.S. Amateur -- which turned public for several years, eventually transitioned back into a private club, and remains so today.
Ten years after its debut, and following a brief mid-1930s run as the Southern Parkway Country Club, Valley Stream opened to the public with $1 green fees ($1.50 on weekends). And like other courses that were unsustainable through the World War II era, by the end of the decade the property was slated for development. "The old Valley Stream Country Club property and golf course, consisting of 71 acres facing Franklin Ave. ... is to be developed into a home community of 500 houses in the $11,000 price range," read a 1948 article.
That development exists today between Franklin Avenue and Valley Stream North High School, with Park Lane North representing the former course's northern boundary. At its center, curved like a double-dogleg par-5, is Fairway Road.
[PICTURED -- TOP: Postcard looking south from the course grounds. The homes in the background still stand along the Southern State Parkway entrance ramp at Franklin Avenue. ABOVE LEFT: A 1931 newspaper ad, one of several that boasted the club was "Equal to any -- superior to most." ABOVE RIGHT: Like many others in the Depression/post-WWII era, the Valley Stream course's final chapter was written by real estate developers (photo published May 1949).]
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UPDATE, 8/12/2020: Nassau County's Land Record Viewer online map now features aerial imagery of the entire county from the years 1926 and 1950. As mentioned above, by the late 1940s the Valley Stream Country Club property was slated for development, and when the 1950 aerial photo was taken, it appears much of the new residential community was complete. Seen in the image, at the center of the development are the clear remnants of at least one or two putting greens -- located at what today would be the southern end of Fairway Road -- as well as several bunkers. The clearing at the right edge of the photo could possibly be a yet-to-be-developed hole corridor.
SEE OTHER STREET-NAME POSTS:
Part 1: Cedar Point/Meadowlawn/Westwood -- North Woodmere
Part 2: The Lido Club -- Lido Beach
Part 4: Sayville Golf Club -- Sayville
Newspaper images courtesy of Brooklyn Daily Eagle via Newspapers.com
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