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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Like the previous entry in this street-name series, a relatively unknown course ill-prepared to pull its way through the Depression era left its mark on the local map with a Fairway Drive. The only difference between the Valley Stream Country Club and this feature's Sayville Golf Club is that the Sayville neighborhood that replaced the golf grounds is left with two Fairways instead of one.
Sayville Golf Club debuted in 1903 during an era of course-building that served members of new and established country clubs as well as hotel guests and city dwellers. Sayville was more of the latter -- it was one of several areas on Long Island's south shore known as a resort destination, and it would also develop into a popular community for summer residents from Brooklyn. The course itself was built on a small parcel along Great South Bay, with nine holes covering around 30 acres along Candee Avenue.
Previews included the type of exaggeration standard for the era. "It is said that the turf comes as near to the typical Scotch soil as any to be found on Long Island," said a July 1903 write-up in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Charter members paid $10 for the season and non-members could play for 50 cents, according to the 2015 book Sayville and West Sayville: Pictured Through the Years.
It wasn't until July 1922 that a clubhouse was built on the property, offering the services of a country club in addition to golf. Prior to that, a second course opened on a piece of farmland north of the original course on Montauk Highway and shared space with a tennis club. Throughout the 1920s, the various clubs starred as lively social gathering spots serving well-known families from the local area and parts of the city.
But as the common story goes, the Depression set in and bent many of Long Island's less prominent clubs until they broke. Sayville was sold in 1935 to a developer who planned a neighborhood of "Elizabethan and New England-style" homes, per the Eagle. In the golf course's place sat about a half-dozen new residential roads, two of which -- Fairway Drive East and Fairway Drive West -- live on today sized and spaced like parallel par-4s.
SEE OTHER STREET-NAME POSTS:
Part 1: Cedar Point/Meadowlawn/Westwood -- North Woodmere
Part 2: The Lido Club -- Lido Beach
Part 3: Valley Stream Country Club -- Valley Stream
Newspaper images courtesy of Brooklyn Daily Eagle via Newspapers.com
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