Golf on Long Island

Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past, Part 6 -- Mill Pond East

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.

******

A tiny minority of Long Islanders have the rare ability to walk off their front porches onto a street boasting the name of a famed U.S. Open golf course, turn onto the home of The Masters and loop around to a cul-de-sac titled for another historic American golf club.  There are golf course views and access to pools, a spa, a rec center -- no, it's not a golf resort, but it's close.

The Meadowbrook Pointe Links and Spa retirement community in Medford is the next-door neighbor of Mill Pond Golf Course, and beyond its front gates weave residential streets like Augusta Drive, Pebble Beach Road and Cypress Pointe Court.  Many of the large, modern homes look out over Mill Pond's lengthy 12th and 18th fairways.

Not long ago, the land beneath those homes and roads shared a much more intimate relationship with Mill Pond, because it was Mill Pond -- its East Course, to be exact, the third nine of what for a brief time in the early 2000s was a 27-hole golf facility.

Today Mill Pond is a popular 18-hole destination, but when it opened in 1999, it featured three distinct nine-hole layouts.  The North, West and East courses were designed by Buddy Johnson and built over what was previously flat Medford farmland.  From that level ground emerged a links-style course complete with mounds and dales, tall rough and a heavy wind presence.  The complex featured six large ponds, three of which rippled peacefully on the East Course.

Like its sister courses, Mill Pond East dotted its fairways with small, round bunkers and protected its greens with larger traps and diagonal approaches.  Some holes flipped the script, pitting the fairways instead with big, irregular traps and carving pot bunkers near the greens.  Three holes required tee shots over or around the ponds, including the short par-3 seventh.

The East Course enjoyed only a fleeting moment along Mill Road, though.  While play on the other 18 holes carried on, by 2006 Mill Pond closed and abandoned the East.  For several seasons the fairways and greens deteriorated in plain sight, until builders finally broke ground in 2010 on the new Meadowbrook residences. 

In addition to Pebble, Cypress and Augusta, the community also honors more modern American golf meccas with streets named for Pacific Dunes and Sand Hills.

Fun fact: Early in Mill Pond East's short run, two residential streets were built near the southern end of the course-- Tee Box Court and Mulligan Drive.

[PICTURED: Mill Pond Golf ad, circa 2005.]

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
Part 5: Riverhead Country Club -- Riverhead

Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past, Part 5 -- Riverhead Country Club

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.

******

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

Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past, Part 4 -- Sayville Golf Club

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.

******

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

Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past, Part 3 - Valley Stream Country Club

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.

******

Unlike the courses previously covered in this street-name series, this lost layout is not memorialized with a variety of basic golf terms or a roster of its era's most renowned players.  The only remaining clue to the Valley Stream Country Club's brief existence in southwest Nassau County is a short, curved residential street called Fairway Road.

Nearly 90 years ago, the site of today's Fairway Road was at the center of one of the few Long Island courses to take its first swing in the midst of the Great Depression.  Valley Stream Country Club, bordered by the recently built Southern State Parkway to the south and Franklin Avenue to the west, opened for play as a private facility in 1931. 

In spite of the economic realities of the time, the club seemed hopeful that enough optimism lingered from the 1920s golf boom to buoy the club through its infancy.  It fired at the pin right away, immediately billing itself as "a superior golf course for the discriminating."  Its unofficial slogan used in several newspaper ads read "Equal to any -- superior to most" -- surely a bold statement for a new Long Island club playing in the shadow of famed Gold Coast and South Shore stalwarts.

Joseph Kantor designed the 6,450-yard course on a relatively small parcel alongside the parkway.  In a May 1932 description of the course, Ralph Trost of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle -- a writer who chronicled the trajectory of many of the Island's courses in the 1920s and 1930s -- used a meandering comparison to Scottish golf to describe Valley Stream as undersized and flat, though in a good way.  He said the flat ground allowed Kantor to build tame bunkers that "look extraordinarily formidable" and "awe-inspiring" from afar.  The sandy base allowed interesting holes to be constructed, Trost said, including the third hole with a water carry over an artificial hazard where soil had been excavated to build up other parts the course.

Within a year, with the world economy in freefall, Valley Stream softened its boastful approach and instead rebranded itself as a safe, welcoming haven for those still able to use golf as a real-world diversion.  "Have you had to give up golf?" started one 1932 ad.  "The quality of membership is to be unimpaired, but if you have been hard hit and want a real golf club that you can afford, write us today."  Still, the soothing tone was not meant to distract from the club's true purpose.  Two weeks later, a similar ad read, "This is NOT a public course."

And so it went through the 1930s, a volatile time for even the most respected and renowned golf clubs on Long Island, let alone a newcomer obscured by Lido, Seawane and other nearby courses.  This was an era when the Daily Eagle, in 1933, printed a series of obituaries for the Engineers Club in Roslyn -- home of the 1919 PGA Championship and 1920 U.S. Amateur -- which turned public for several years, eventually transitioned back into a private club, and remains so today.

Ten years after its debut, and following a brief mid-1930s run as the Southern Parkway Country Club, Valley Stream opened to the public with $1 green fees ($1.50 on weekends).  And like other courses that were unsustainable through the World War II era, by the end of the decade the property was slated for development.  "The old Valley Stream Country Club property and golf course, consisting of 71 acres facing Franklin Ave. ... is to be developed into a home community of 500 houses in the $11,000 price range," read a 1948 article.

That development exists today between Franklin Avenue and Valley Stream North High School, with Park Lane North representing the former course's northern boundary.  At its center, curved like a double-dogleg par-5, is Fairway Road. 

[PICTURED -- TOP: Postcard looking south from the course grounds. The homes in the background still stand along the Southern State Parkway entrance ramp at Franklin Avenue. ABOVE LEFT: A 1931 newspaper ad, one of several that boasted the club was "Equal to any -- superior to most." ABOVE RIGHT: Like many others in the Depression/post-WWII era, the Valley Stream course's final chapter was written by real estate developers (photo published May 1949).]

******

UPDATE, 8/12/2020: Nassau County's Land Record Viewer online map now features aerial imagery of the entire county from the years 1926 and 1950.  As mentioned above, by the late 1940s the Valley Stream Country Club property was slated for development, and when the 1950 aerial photo was taken, it appears much of the new residential community was complete.  Seen in the image, at the center of the development are the clear remnants of at least one or two putting greens -- located at what today would be the southern end of Fairway Road -- as well as several bunkers.  The clearing at the right edge of the photo could possibly be a yet-to-be-developed hole corridor.

SEE OTHER STREET-NAME POSTS:
Part 1: Cedar Point/Meadowlawn/Westwood -- North Woodmere
Part 2: The Lido Club -- Lido Beach
Part 4: Sayville Golf Club -- Sayville

Newspaper images courtesy of Brooklyn Daily Eagle via Newspapers.com

Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past, Part 2 -- Lido Club

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.

Historians, followers of golf architecture and devotees of famed early-20th-century designers are well versed in the story of the original Lido Club and the legacy that's lasted since its World War II-era demise.  Yet for many casual players, for beachgoers relaxing on the sand at Lido West, and for Long Beach High School students milling near remnants of the old Channel hole, Lido's status a century ago as an engineering marvel and an icon of Golden Age golf is far from their thoughts. 

The abbreviated story goes like this:  In 1914, C.B. Macdonald was coaxed out of semi-retirement by a project that would allow him to design a brand-new course on the remote Long Beach barrier island, with full creative control and access to very deep pockets.  Building the course on a barren sandbar required dredging two million cubic yards of fill from the bottom of Reynolds Channel, in addition to the expertise -- provided by Scottish groundskeeper Peter Lees -- in growing grass on sand.  The project took three years to complete and totaled an astronomical $1.43 million, and the end result was what esteemed golf writer Bernard Darwin considered "the finest course in the world," a sentiment that was echoed by other scribes of the era.

In 1928, a stunning new clubhouse and hotel towered over the beach, and soon after, the club was built out with a half-mile of oceanfront cabanas and the sorts of luxe amenities that lured high-rollers to the Atlantic.  As for the course itself, unlike in the current bayside layout, holes ran from channel to ocean.  Tee shots were launched from one side of a crude Lido Boulevard toward fairways on the other.  A par-3 of more than 230 yards played right along the beach sand (within a few years it was swallowed up by a storm, then shortened).  Macdonald's "Channel" hole was a celebrated example of risk/reward mastery.  Rough was rugged, and the wind overpowered even the best of the best  All told, the unique circumstances in which it was created, the presence of Macdonald and Seth Raynor (and Alister MacKenzie, who designed the 18th hole), and the club's sudden and unceremonious disappearance combine to form a lasting Lido mystique. 

Meanwhile, as the palatial clubhouse went up beside the ocean, a slightly more modest project was already underway near the bay, just west of the club grounds.  At a time when real estate developers sought to transport the spirit of Italy stateside in the form of "American Venice" neighborhoods, four new canals were built off Reynolds Channel.  In between the canals, a community consisting of narrow, tightly packed streets was planned, all connected by three arched bridges.  Given its association with the big club next door, this American Venice paid homage to 1920s-era golf rather than the European city.  The canals were named Sarazen, Ouimet, Hagen and Jones, and the streets paid tribute to international golfers of the 1910s and 1920s, including Johnny Farrell, Jim Barnes and Joe Kirkwood.

Just a few years later, the Depression set in, and the high times of the Roaring Twenties crashed to a halt.  Lido persisted, however, and the club, carrying enormous financial burden, trudged through the '30s before meeting a very unique end during World War II.  While the economic downturn and onset of global warfare left many Long Island clubs abandoned, neglected or sold off, Lido was leased to the United States Navy, which converted the property into a training base and receiving station.  The Channel hole now launched pontoon boats instead of drives; the opulent clubhouse and hotel became a barracks and mess hall.

The longing for yesteryear began, quite literally, the following season.  "We suddenly realized how much we missed the wind-swept Lido Club.  On the hottest of days, there we always found a cool and refreshing spot," wrote Newsday's Ed Buckley in 1943.  "Hope the Navy lads are enjoying it now." 

Longtime Lido advocate Ralph Trost of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote, "War is serious business and war changes many things.  But that can't stop a fellow from hoping that preparing Lido for the training of Navy men won't demand a complete leveling of the place.  Because we're sure it would never come back."

There was interest after the war in resurrecting the Lido course, but the poor condition of structures built on the grounds and complications in reacquiring the whole parcel scrapped any plans.  A new course -- today's Lido Golf Club -- was built on an entirely new site to the east.  Eventually, Long Beach High School and Middle School, plus residential streets, were built over the old course.

Meanwhile, The Canals neighborhood, complete with narrow one-way streets memorializing golfers from a century ago, lives on hidden away in a quiet corner of Long Beach.  Not far from Farrell Street and due south of Bob Jones Canal, and still overlooking the beach, is the old Lido clubhouse and hotel, now the Lido Towers condominium and the only existing link to Macdonald's short-lived masterpiece.

[PICTURED: TOP -- An aerial view of the Lido Club, with the new clubhouse/hotel at bottom left and part of The Canals neighborhood at top left; MIDDLE -- Today, each of the three arch bridges that span the canals include a plaque with a brief description of the area's history; BOTTOM -- Nearly a century since they were first drawn up, narrow streets still bear the names of World War I-era golfers.]

SEE OTHER STREET-NAME POSTS:
Part 1: Cedar Point/Meadowlawn/Westwood -- North Woodmere
Part 3: Valley Stream Country Club -- Valley Stream
Part 4: Sayville Golf Club -- Sayville

Golf-related Street Names: The Ghosts of Long Island Golf's Past, Part 1

For years, on the way to playing nine holes at North Woodmere Park, I wondered why a street named "Golf Drive" existed in a residential area with no apparent connection to golf.  The Nassau muni was about a half-mile away, and certainly not the type of course to be commemorated on road signs.  Had I ever turned down Golf Drive, my mind might have been blown.  Along its short run it crosses streets named Bunker, Eagle and Hook.  It doesn't stop there -- on the other side of a hazard-sized inlet are roads like Fairway Drive, Green Place and Tee Court. 

It wouldn't be until only recently during my research for "Long Island Golf" that I discovered the reason behind the golf-centric street names.  Those Woodmere neighborhoods between Peninsula Boulevard and Hungry Harbor Road were built on top of what was once a golf course. 

Digging deeper revealed that this was a fairly common occurrence.  When the suburbanization of Long Island kicked into high gear, in many cases, failing or abandoned golf courses were leveled, paved over and topped with the neighborhoods we know today.  Often the old golf grounds were memorialized on street signs.

So, as a sucker for this sort of local history, I plan to feature these road-mapped ghosts of Long Island golf's past on occasion over the coming months.  Are there golf-titled roads in your area?  Perhaps you live in the middle of a long-gone fairway -- or pot bunker.

As for the above-mentioned course:

Known as Cedar Point and built over marshland west of Woodmere, the course came to be, most likely, during the 1920s golf boom.  Newspaper and other published accounts reference possible ties to organized crime.  Evidently the course was plagued with drainage and flooding issues that would render it unplayable for extended periods after rains.  In 1932, the course was rebranded as Meadowlawn Golf Club and introduced a "pay as you play" policy that one local newspaper, The Wave, found to be a novel concept.

"Seldom is it that the public is permitted to share a sporty 18-hole course, a splendid modern clubhouse, old English grill, up-to-date lockers and showers on a green-fee basis," The Wave reported, ironically the same year that Lenox Hills Golf Club became a public facility in what would eventually be known as Bethpage State Park.

Meadowlawn fell short of its lofty expectations.  In the spring of 1938, it became known as the Westwood Golf & Tennis Club, and in the five years since the dawn of Meadowlawn, the course had been "neglected and abused both physically and conversationally by the golfing fraternity," according to the Nassau Daily Review-Star. 

The story comes to a rather typical and uneventful conclusion.  Like many middling clubs in the post-Depression and World War II era, it floundered until it was either sold or abandoned.  Newsday articles in 1945 described attempts to build a racetrack on the property.  Tragically, in 1947, two people died in a fire that burned down the deteriorating former clubhouse.

One interesting part of its history concerns a players' club organized by former caddies at courses around the nearby Rockaway peninsula.  The club held its championships at various Long Island courses, including Cedar Point during its final days.  Eventually, the club decided to purchase the failing Nassau Shores Country Club's course farther east in Massapequa and refurbished it into the "Peninsula" Golf Club that still exists today.

SEE OTHER STREET-NAME POSTS:
Part 2: The Lido Club -- Lido Beach
Part 3: Valley Stream Country Club -- Valley Stream
Part 4: Sayville Golf Club -- Sayville