It's a special season at Bay Park Golf Course, though you won't find any milestones announced on a banner billowing over the park entrance or stretched across the facade of the course's faceless, utilitarian brick clubhouse. There are no anniversary logos printed on hats and polos, no leather-bound books to chronicle the course's half-century beside the bay in East Rockaway. No turn-back-the-clock green-fee specials with yesteryear pricing, for sure. And if even a small handful of local golfers are aware that Bay Park made its debut the same year as Joe Namath's guarantee and the Miracle Mets, it likely won't come up in conversation.
What you can bank on though is a scanned Leisure Pass, a point in the direction of the first tee and another day of basic nine-hole golf with local youngsters, seniors and all the groups of novices in between.
Bay Park has quietly gone about its business serving Nassau golfers since 1969, making this its 50th-anniversary season. Tucked away at the southern edge of a recently rejuvenated Bay Park complex that's just about unrecognizable to even the longest of longtime visitors, the golf course itself remains a familiar throwback, its hilltop first and second greens standing tall behind a chain-link fence, leading golfers toward the bay.
With the golf world slowly readjusting its focus more toward accessible public and municipal golf for all, there's a certain charm to functional Bay Park and its Nassau County Parks brethren at North Woodmere, Cantiague and Christopher Morley. Bay Park is free of pizzazz. There are no dramatic, stylishly shadowed photos of its greens, few travel more than a couple of minutes to play it, and those who do swing by don't record their visit with pristinely filtered social-media tales. It's simply golf pared down to its core -- grandkids learning the game with grandfathers, little sister swinging alongside big brother, groups of young friends and groups of seniors, all playing nine holes over 1,900-plus mostly flat yards at the neighborhood golf course.
Bay Park opened for play in 1969 on the site of a former dump with green fees of $1.25 on weekdays and $2 on weekends. The course's debut wasn't without some Long Island-style political drama -- in December 1968, it was announced that Bay Park's spring opening would be postponed due to budget cuts. So that spring and summer, with the course already built and prepared for play, it sat empty except for a crew completing the clubhouse building and a single greenskeeper tending to the grass. Meanwhile, local residents and community groups bombarded the office of Nassau County Executive Eugene Nickerson with complaints, per Newsday.
When a reworked budget "found" some money to cover operating costs, the golf course opened in late summer. Unlike today's course, the 1969 version was equipped with light stanchions that would allow for night play. "I used to hit those poles all the time," says William Kienke, who lived near the course on Rhame Avenue. "Big wooden poles like the ones on the way to Jones Beach. Great ricochet."
Another East Rockaway resident at the time recalls how it was impossible to track the flight of the ball once it went above the lights during nighttime rounds. Night golf at Bay Park, however, was very short-lived -- due to issues with water pressure, soil moisture and wiring, the lights rarely worked as designed. "The lights were terrible and didn't last too long," he says. "After they took the lights down, they left the poles up for years, which made bad shots even worse."
The course has seen its highs and lows over the half century. It opened near the tail end of the 1960s/early-1970s Long Island golf growth spurt that introduced dozens of modern public and private courses and nearly all of today's county municipal layouts. Long Island began to shed courses through the 1980s, but once the Tiger Woods era boomed in the late '90s, Bay Park, like most other courses, was jammed. As Tiger took the golf world by storm, waits to get on Bay Park's 299-yard opening par-4 were often measured in hours.
Valley Stream native Matt Krantweiss played Bay Park in between two-a-day soccer practices nearby at Valley Stream South High School in the late summers of 1997 and 1998. "After morning practices we'd go over to Bay Park to get nine holes in before we had to be back in the afternoon," he says. "The wait was so long, with so many groups waiting to tee off on each hole, we rarely could finish nine holes."
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy took down trees on the course and littered it with debris from boats docked nearby, along with other courses on the south shore that were submerged by ocean and bay waters.
Today, just about everything about the park has changed, including the access road that leads visitors down toward the course, though once on the fairways and greens, there's not much to tip off whether it's 1969 or 2019 -- save for the lack of light poles, of course.
For more on Bay Park, check out the course flyover.
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