Golf on Long Island: Resurrecting long-lost Lido golf -- the Lido Springs Par-3 course

Turns out it's true.

Down in Lido Beach, a small oceanfront community that plays a giant role in golf history, there is an old, lost golf course, after all. It's right next door to the present-day Lido Golf Course, and its features, drawn up by one of Long Island's most influential golf builders, remain almost fully intact. One putting green is split by a knob in its back half, another sits with rimmed edges. Raised tees, buried beneath a tangle of tree branches and weeds, rest amid overgrown hazards and muddy ponds, waiting to be found.

No, this isn't the glorious hallucination of the most ardent Lido Club enthusiast. Plenty of golf historians have studied those hallowed grounds, and some have even walked the streets and Lido Beach dunes, knowing they'll never stumble across some trace of the famous pre-World War II masterpiece. This other course, well, nobody's trying to find it. And if they are, they better be toting bug spray.

No, this is the story of Lido Springs, a short-lived par-3 course that came and went, following dozens of other little-known area golf courses that also came and went, and made a few memories along the way. It was lit up for night play and pitched side attractions like mini golf and a game room -- not exactly the type of place commemorated in club histories or sepia-toned coffee-table books. Yet there's some history worth exploring, and for now it holds a very unique distinction in Long Island golf history. Lido Springs is likely the only instance of a long-gone local golf course sitting untouched, undeveloped, right out there among all of Long Island's hustle and bustle.

And thanks to modern technology, plus help from one of the key figures involved in next year's resurrection of that other lost Lido course, we can see Lido Springs today, down to the finest detail, as if unobstructed by 40 years of physical neglect.

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When Lido Springs opened in the summer of 1963, the big Robert Trent Jones layout next door -- today's municipal Lido course -- was just a few seasons old. And it had been only two decades since the famed original, C.B. Macdonald's Lido Club, was repurposed for military use in the early years of World War II. That renowned course was to the west. Lido Springs, on the other hand, played along Lido's eastern flank, its nine short par-3s wedged into a little triangular parcel dotted with five ponds.

"New Golf Course Opens at Lido," read the headline in The Leader, a Freeport newspaper, on July 11. "Golf pros of the Nassau County clubs, as well as many other luminaries of the golf world were present at the opening," the article said.

John Brennan, a writer who chronicled the development and construction of Long Island's golf courses for various publications in the 1950s and '60s, indicated in one of his "Off the Fairway" columns that the new Lido Springs was built as an annex to RTJ's neighboring 18. "Lidoites feel the addition of the short course will help take some of the load from the big course, with some of the older men members ... being detoured to the par-three layout," he wrote prior to its opening.

Players could enjoy a round well after sundown thanks to the "newest and finest daylight illumination on Long Island," according to the Leader. Advertisements that ran in Newsday highlighted night golf as a selling point, and the course, at least in its early years, was open until midnight. Rounds after dark were a novelty, and many who played Lido Springs fondly recall them. Some just remember swatting the gnats and mosquitoes.

"It was so well lit, you saw the ball all the way up in the air and down to the green," says Jeffrey Bernstein, who moved from Brooklyn to Atlantic Beach in 1966. Summers for Bernstein included trips to the driving range on the south side of Lido Boulevard, and eventually nine holes at Lido Springs. He would grab one or two clubs and a putter and bike with friends from one end of the barrier island to the other. Sometimes they'd leave the bikes home and hitchhike to the course instead.

Other elements set Lido Springs apart from the typical pitch-and-putt course. It was initially planned as a semi-private club with memberships, tee times and an on-site pro. Most notably, the design of its nine short holes was credited to William Mitchell, the golf course designer whose frequent work in the 1960s and early 1970s altered Long Island's golf landscape the same way Macdonald, Seth Raynor, Devereux Emmet and others left their marks in the early 20th century.

By July 1963, Long Island's second golf building boom was already well underway, and Mitchell played a big part. His course at Pine Hollow Country Club in 1955 was the first to be built in the region since the end of the Depression and ensuing war years. When a dozen new courses opened locally in 1961 and 1962, Mitchell's hand was on at least two of them -- Old Westbury and Woodcrest. Mitchell would come to be known as golf's "public defender" -- he felt strongly about designing courses public players could take pride in, with features that were fair to the average high-handicapper. He was a proponent of executive-length courses for their smaller demand on time and land use, and his goal was to eventually build a women's golf course on Long Island. (Plans had already been drawn when Mitchell passed away in the early '70s.)

It's hard to know exactly how much time and energy Mitchell invested in the Lido Springs layout (his 18-hole course at Noyac in Sag Harbor opened the same year), but it certainly incorporated many of his design principles. Greens featured some interesting contours, though nothing too "gimmicky," as he described movement that could potentially penalize good shots and reward bad ones. For the less-skilled player, bunkers were in full view, mostly fronting greens. ("I don't like to hide a trap," he often said.) A series of small ponds came into play on all but two or three holes. As far as time and land use, the nine holes took up less than ten acres and likely no more than an hour to play.

"It was a real golf course, just scaled way down," says Rob Koff, a lifelong area resident who recalls many night rounds there, complete with burgers and fries at the snack bar. "The greens were legitimate, and the fairway areas were kept in great shape."

"They took care of it," Bernstein says. "It was in better condition than Lido next door."

Beyond the initial grand opening, and some newspaper advertisements that ran through the '60s and '70s, there's not much else that officially documents the course's 20-year run, which ended with its abandonment sometime in the early '80s. It's not mentioned in any profiles or retrospectives about Mitchell's design career, and there are no reports of its closure. Yet signs of it are still as clear as day to anyone driving down Lido Boulevard or up the 12th fairway at the current Lido course. The light poles that illuminated so many summer nights and brightened so many memories still stand tall and slightly crooked above the overgrowth. One that towered over the ninth green is just steps from the boulevard, not far from the rusted remnants of a chain-link fence that separated the course from the parking lot.

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That's the fascinating thing about Lido Springs. It's still there, waiting to be found.

All Peter Flory needed was an aerial photo and some public data to bring Lido Springs back to life. Followers of Lido golf history might recognize the name -- Flory, a Chicago-area golfer who counts digitally reconstructing lost golf courses as a hobby, is serving as an advisor for the Lido Club restoration at Sand Valley in Wisconsin. He spent three years meticulously generating incredibly detailed renderings of the Lido Club by piecing together clues from aerial photos, ground-level images and written works, then posted them on Golf Club Atlas to be studied and scrutinized by fellow historians and designers. His work drew the attention of Tom Doak, then Sand Valley's Mike Keiser, who used his images to pitch a restored Lido to prospective members. That highly anticipated course is scheduled to open in 2023.

Resurrecting Lido Springs took Flory about two days. An inquiry at the Long Beach Historical Society found its way to Flory, by now established as a trusted Lido Beach golf-architecture historian. Using archived and current aerial images, he was able to quickly estimate and sketch the location of tees and greens, and publicly available LiDAR data allowed him to paint the picture. The precise surface elevation data not only revealed that all but one green remain on the ground at Lido Springs, it also pulled up all of their ridges and slopes. Once plugged into his golf-design software, the LiDAR exposed the surface as if it was bare ground with no overgrowth. Flory used his judgment to flesh out rough and short grass around the holes, but the greens needed no manipulation.

"The contours that you're seeing on the image are actually there on the ground," Flory says.

So we know now that the first hole was around 80 yards, give or take a few by tee placement, with a pond short left. "There's a very cool pocket on the right side of the green," Flory says. Only three of the holes went beyond 100 yards. One of them, the fourth, had ponds long and right, and a front bunker with a raised lip. The 121-yard ninth required a pond carry to a green with a back-half knob and raised shoulders. By the looks of it, misfires there could easily find themselves lost onto Lido Boulevard.

With the three-dimensional model finished, Flory can make Lido Springs playable on a gaming PC, PlayStation, XBox and even some golf simulators. It's something Flory did with his Lido Club renderings, complete with his digital self decked out in vintage golfwear, hickory clubs in hand.

As far as playing it again outside under the Lido Beach sun (or stars), technically it's not that far-fetched. Anyone with a few million dollars handy and the stomach for a battle with the Town of Hempstead or Nassau County could conceivably resurrect the course in real life. The property has been up for sale for years and is zoned to allow municipal recreation.

Bernstein thinks of the course every time he walks the fairway of the adjacent 12th hole at Lido. Just a few paces away, on the other side of a fence, Bernstein once stood on a raised tee, looking across the entire Lido Springs course lit up in full view from one end to the other.

"You saw fathers and sons, groups of friends, kids with six-packs," he says. "People from all walks of life out there just having a lot of fun."

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[PICTURED (click to enlarge): TOP -- Rendering of Lido Springs #1; MIDDLE -- Advertisements printed in Newsday in May and September 1966. The course advertised in the paper throughout the '60s and '70s and typically promoted night golf; MIDDLE RIGHT -- Aerial photo of Lido Springs, the triangular property at center, as seen in 1966. Lido Golf Course is to the left, and the Lido Beach Nike missile base is seen to the right; BOTTOM RIGHT -- The full Lido Springs routing, as interpreted using public LiDAR data. All greens remain intact on the site except #2. The rendering of #9 shows a bunkerless green with raised shoulders and a knob at back center. Lido Boulevard was located directly behind the hole.]

The digital renderings published here are the intellectual property of Peter Flory.

For more reading on Lido golf history, see previous Golf On Long Island entries below:

Comments

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Thank you for this! I remember playing in Long Beach with my dad in the '70s, but nothing about the Long Beach municipal (even the name) felt familiar. It was Lido Springs!
So glad it makes sense now!

Posted by: jc | February 16, 2022 at 09:51 AM