To the untrained eye, or rather, the eye of anyone who is not a golf-course designer, the big, barren sand mines of Port Washington were exactly as they appeared – big, barren sand mines.
To Michael Hurdzan and his design team, the excavated pits that drove industry along Long Island Sound for more than a century might as well have been sun-splashed Caribbean beaches, where sand funnels between toes and imaginations run wild with vibrant visions of the future. These pits were the gritty stuff a designer's dreams are made of.
"We looked and thought, 'This is awesome,'" Hurdzan recalls of his initial experience in the mines beside Hempstead Harbor, nearly 25 years to the day that his Harbor Links Golf Course debuted at the bottom of one of those quarries. "We didn't have to worry about things like taking down trees. The land was already destroyed. We were going to put it back together."
The par-72 Championship Course at Harbor Links opened near the end of July 1998 and was followed later that year by the nine-hole Executive Course.
Hurdzan left Long Island and the residents of the Town of North Hempstead with a challenging golf course that stands out as one of the region's most unique golfing options. Tees and greens hover on plateaus built along the tall, once-sandy bluff left over from the property's mining days. Fairways curl around rejuvenated wetlands. Rocky features are more American Southwest than North Shore. (One hole is aptly named "Arizona.") And it's a case study in using a golf course to reverse an environmental calamity. Hurdzan is known for creating eco-friendly golf courses, and Harbor Links almost immediately became a member of Audubon International's Signature Program.
"Harbor Links is special," says Hurdzan, who ranks the course in his top 25 of personal course designs, no small claim for someone credited with several hundred original designs and remodels. Nationally, he says, "it's an undiscovered gem."
It was Hurdzan's previous work at a Massachusetts golf course called Widow's Walk that served as the inspiration for Harbor Links. There, on a similarly destroyed, stripped-bare mining site near Massachusetts Bay, Hurdzan and a team of environmentalists collaborated on a design and built what he calls the first "environmental demonstration" golf course in the world.
Widow's Walk drew the attention of May Newburger, North Hempstead's town supervisor, who had a nearly identical problem on her hands in Port Washington. The sandy canyons and the rusting waste dumped in the old Morewood property were an eyesore, and an expensive one at that. The town purchased the property years prior, but plans to build an incinerator or other industrial and recreational developments had already been scrapped. Newburger was determined to use the land for the public good, and she knew Hurdzan had a knack for turning a property around through golf.
"She thought if it could be done at Widow's Walk, it could be done at Harbor Links," Hurdzan says. He credits Newburger as the figure most responsible for bringing the course to the property. "She was a persuasive person and a very smart politician." (Part of Hempstead Harbor was renamed "May Newburger Cove" in 2017.)
On the grounds, it took 60,000 cubic yards of compost and a stabilization of the eroded bluffs to make a sustainable golf course possible. In the town halls and offices, it took cooperation between multiple departments and the golf-design team to ensure the project stayed on track without delays. The 18-hole course, with its native grasses, wildlife habitats and 50 acres of wetlands, was complete in a little over a year. "We made champagne out of that lemon, not lemonade," Newburger told the New York Times.
Unique landscape aside, Harbor Links is known for its three double-fairway holes, including one – the par-5 sixth – that is considered by many the course's signature hole. It tees off from elevated grounds along the bluff, with players forced to decide between a risky shortcut to a high-side fairway and a safer but longer route down the valley. The green sits up on a plateau. The preceding par-4 fifth asks golfers the same question. Stay low with safety or go for the daring target up top? Hurdzan used these designs to find both golf and construction solutions.
"We worked with the contours on the site and made the different levels work for the double-fairway holes," he says. "In the process we minimized the earth-moving and solved a golf problem at the same time."
The bluff, always in the background and sometimes part of play, gives the course the feel of an amphitheater, something that Hurdzan wanted to "celebrate." On the back nine, two holes curve around its base, followed by the par-5 16th, where downhill drives tee off from a set of tiers built into the hillside. Earlier, sandy mounds remain near the 13th tee ("The Dunes") as a tribute to the site's industrial past.
Not much has changed about the course since it opened a quarter century ago, other than a new set of elevated tees on the par-3 17th. Time has transformed the sandy bluff into a high hill covered in trees and foliage. First-time players likely have no idea they are playing 18 at the bottom of a sand mine.
Hurdzan is proud he was able to give town and Long Island residents such an asset, and he recalls fondly the cooperative effort between his group and local government.
"I didn't even mind the Long Island traffic to get there," Hurdzan says.
[PICTURED: TOP RIGHT – #4 green with the once-sandy bluff in the background; ABOVE LEFT – Hempstead Harbor's sand mines as seen in the 1920s/1930s. The Harbor Links site is at top center. (Photo courtesy Ian Zwerdling); ABOVE RIGHT – The par-4 10th and double-fairway 13th, with the bluff and sand mounds in the distance.]
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