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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Many points of interest contend for the attention of the Long Island admirer on a drive heading east from downtown Riverhead. First up are the shops and riverside cafes in the business district, the Long Island Aquarium, then a short jaunt to the northeast before reaching the produce stands, wineries and spacious farms and fields of the North Fork.
Along that curving road between county seat and Wine Country are two attractions that few beyond followers of golf and local history would consider eye-catching -- one is a street sign marking Fairway Avenue and the other, just a block ahead, a vintage-looking Elks Lodge.
Roads named for fairways, of course, are often a tell. Chances are, whether named as some variation of Fairway Drive or Fairway Road, the signpost marks the site of a long-gone golf course. Here, where Route 25 turns toward Aquebogue, once stood the Riverhead Country Club golf course, its clubhouse still in existence as the aforementioned Elks Lodge.
Riverhead Country Club came to be in 1921. The golf course was built over farmland on both sides of Route 25 with a driving range behind the clubhouse. Newspaper accounts of the course's opening didn't hold back on the type of grandiosity standard for golf writing of that era. Riverhead was "declared by some experts to be one of the handsomest and best on Long Island," according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and "was formally opened ... by social functions more brilliant than anything ever before held in this town."
The Eagle continued: "The very face of nature was changed to produce the course. An expanse of swamps, unsightly hedgerows and waste land have been molded into a scenic panorama that makes even passing motorists stop and take a second look."
Covering a modest 82 acres according to news and historical accounts, Riverhead's golf course was likely similar in build to a modern-day executive course. Or perhaps it was a bit longer, packing in as much yardage as possible at the expense of safe boundaries between holes. In the club's inaugural season, a member of the East End's well-known Griffing family took an errant shot right to the kisser, his bloody lips and loosened teeth chalked up to the overwhelming popularity of the nine-hole course (it was expanded to 18 in season two).
The club stood out as a prominent social and recreational venue through the boom of the 1920s, but the music stopped and the tee shots were eventually grounded as the malaise of the 1930s set in. A 1940 news article on a local group's bid to resurrect the course indicates the property had "not been used in any way for several years." For the next few seasons it saw intermittent play, though not enough for the club to remain solvent.
In 1946, the clubhouse and surrounding land was purchased by the American Legion, which then sold the larger parcel on the west side of Route 25 the following year for the development of homes for military members and veterans. This small community was called "Riverhead Greens" -- and is still known locally as The Greens -- in honor of the golf course buried underneath.
The Riverhead Elks purchased the clubhouse in the 1950s, and the historic lodge is now closing in on its 100th anniversary.
[PICTURED: Riverhead Country Club postcard, circa 1920s; courtesy Gail Evans]
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
Part 4: Sayville Golf Club -- Sayville
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