Golf on Long Island

Golf and the "Long Island Express," 80 years ago this weekend

Fall arrived on Long Island this weekend carrying with it bright sunshine and comfortable temperatures -- ideal conditions for the start of autumn golf season.  Eighty years ago this weekend, however, in the first days of the new fall season, Long Islanders on the East End ventured outside not to play golf, but to survey the damage left behind by one of the most vicious storms in local history. 

On September 21, 1938, a storm so fast-moving that it would come to be known as the "Long Island Express" crashed ashore near Bellport as a category 3 hurricane.  Its uncommon speed left Long Island unprepared, weather forecasters flummoxed and areas east of the storm's eye in ruins.  In the days that followed, East End residents picked up the pieces of homes and businesses and first witnessed a newly changed landscape, as the Island's south shore geography changed in a flash.

The Express took its toll on the Long Island golf landscape as well, already struggling through the turmoil of the Depression era.  The Maidstone Club in East Hampton was "battered to pieces," wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, with remnants of the club's cabanas strewn across the beach amid other damage.  The club's 36-hole layout, feared lost at first, was reduced to its current 27 due to storm damage.  A source described the state of the course for the Daily Eagle in the storm's aftermath:

The worst damage was done on the ninth.  There the wind tore through the big protective dunes, swept away the tee and carried on through the tenth.  The ninth fairway is under about three feet of water.  The 15th tee is gone and, freakishly, the waters knifed off the back of the 14th green.  Plenty of mud lies on the 17th, while the holes across the pond, the third and 16th, got a severe salt bath.  Both bridges were tossed almost across the road.

Westhampton, just east of the storm's landfall, was leveled by the storm.  More than two dozen people were killed in Westhampton alone.  At the Westhampton Country Club, the clubhouse was temporarily repurposed as a morgue.  On the course itself, debris littered the fairways, and a boat thrown ashore by the storm was left with its anchor resting in a bunker.

Just to the east in Quogue, two bridges connecting the beach to the mainland were destroyed.  The Quogue Field Club itself was spared in the short term, but the rerouting of an access road through the heart of the course to a new beach bridge eventually caused the club to downsize from 18 holes to nine.

Montauk Downs, like the rest of the Montauk area, was stranded at sea as the Atlantic surged over land and reached Napeague Bay, temporarily turning Montauk into an island.

Meanwhile, to the west, many of the Island's courses were spared lasting damage from what the Daily Eagle described as, at least in some areas, merely "one big rain."  The Lido Club suffered $100,000 in damage along the shoreline.  Stately trees fell at Rockville Links, Hempstead, Garden City and Wheatley Hills.  Fresh Meadow (then in Queens) flooded and lost several trees, though Ralph Trost of the Daily Eagle viewed it as a positive. 

"Two were meant to go," Trost wrote.  "They always cast too much shadow on the 14th green.  But until the wind did the job, no one had the heart to cut 'em down."

[Photos courtesy of East Hampton Library and Westhampton Beach Historical Society.]

Bethpage bolsters digital marketing and social-media voice under pro Kelley Brooke

Bethpage State Park is officially a member of the modern era, and it's not only because booking tee times has migrated away from *66 ("the busy-signal fix").

Nearly two decades after hosting its first U.S. Open and entering the international golf discussion, management at Bethpage is now marketing the Black Course and its four sibling layouts in a way befitting America's leading public-golf facility.  Gone are a sparse NYS Parks landing page and dreary unofficial website.  In their place, a newly designed site and a newly found voice have turned Bethpage from a largely silent golf powerhouse into one of the most socially engaging facilities on the Island.

The park's digital transformation arrives under the watch of Kelley Brooke, the Golf Channel Academy instructor with a resume that lists decades of accomplishments in teaching and golf operations in the New York City metro area.  Since winning a New York State bid and taking over at Bethpage earlier this year, Brooke has been in charge of the pro shop, private lessons, clinics and women's programs.  Her to-do list continues to grow as junior-camp season approaches.  "I'm running everything here but tee times," Brooke says.

Among Brooke's top priorities is marketing, specifically connecting with Long Island golfers on social media, a space where the park has remained mostly quiet outside of the informative @BethpageGolf Twitter feed and that of superintendent Andrew Wilson (@greensideup17).  Over the past few seasons, both have been valuable outlets for photos and information on renovations, aeration schedules and other happenings around the courses.  Brooke's focus, though, is on promoting and growing the many instructional programs, including junior and women's clinics and the park's first-ever summer golf camp, that now make Bethpage what she calls a "full-service academy."

Inside the clubhouse and out on the range, Brooke and her staff teach using a variety of launch monitors, swing and putting analyzers and state-of-the-art video and biofeedback systems.  Instructional programs include sessions focusing on specific areas like driving distance and wedge play, as well as group practices and couples' clinics.  The "Start to Finish Women's Program" meets once a week for five weeks, covers all aspects of the swing and takes players onto the course for a supervised test of skills.

To amplify Bethpage's new voice, Brooke hired Zach Toste, a digital-marketing consultant with golf in his blood.  Toste played at Notre Dame, graduated in 2016 and works remotely from Florida, where he runs Bethpage's new Facebook and Instagram pages, tweaks the website and creates video content.  Toste first learned of Bethpage the way young players in the 1990s discovered TPC Sawgrass -- through video games. 

"I remember seeing the 'Warning' sign in Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf and thinking, 'Wow, that's so cool,' " Toste says.

In addition to promoting Bethpage programs, the digital-marketing team updates the Facebook page with video demonstrations by Brooke and her staff of instructors and fitness professionals.  Action shots around the courses and in training sessions appear on Instagram.  Last week, they launched an e-commerce section on the Bethpage website, enabling fans to purchase head covers, hats and on-course accessories branded with Bethpage's iconic caddy logo.  Toste's also introduced a short-and-sweet Bethpage slogan -- "Experience Tradition."

Their goal, overall, is to connect with all golfers and make Bethpage synonymous with playing, learning and experiencing golf, not simply the Black Course and sleeping in cars for tee times. 

"Golfers haven't really heard much from Bethpage over the years," Toste says.  "We want them to start thinking, 'Hey, there's something going on at Bethpage.' "

[Screenshots courtesy of Bethpage Golf Course via Facebook and Instagram.]

Family-operated Spring Lake Golf Club celebrating its 50th anniversary

Fifty years ago, with the Long Island golf industry in the midst of a boom period, a local farmer turned his attention away from the fields and toward the fairways, setting the groundwork for a new family business that would provide a half-century worth of golf to players in and around Middle Island.  That's the boiled-down story of the Spring Lake Golf Club, a fixture on the local golf scene since 1967, as described by Newsday's Mark Herrmann earlier this month in a profile of the public course in its 50th-anniversary season..

Charles Jurgens, along with his brothers Fred and Herman and course designer Charles K. Martin, built the course in the late 1960s, a decade that saw dozens of new public and private golf facilities pop up in Nassau and Suffolk to accommodate the new suburbanites flocking east to Long Island.  Three generations later the family business of running the 18-hole Thunderbird course and nine-hole Sandpiper course remains successful.

[Jurgens'] life’s work involved putting in the original irrigation system and outlining the fairways, pacing off yardages from Martin’s intricate pencil drawings (which still exist and were out on a clubhouse table yesterday).  His nephew Rick started working at Spring Lake as a teenager and is now the manager.  Rick’s son Tyler is a key member of superintendent Don Amsler’s greens staff and is married to the head pro, the former Cristy Grzymala.  Their two children, five and one, are well known to the golfers who keep showing up.

“Being a family business, it becomes personal,” Cristy said. “They look forward to hearing about our lives and what’s going on.”

The Jurgenses have built and/or owned other courses, including Indian Hills, Heatherwood, Swan Lake and Cherry Creek.  But Spring Lake — with its 18- and nine-hole courses — is the flagship, still doing 50,000 rounds a year despite a national decrease in golf participation." -- Mark Herrmann, Newsday, 9/14/2017

Spring Lake's parkland setup, with trees closely hugging just about every hole, has been given a boost over the past few seasons thanks to faster green speeds.  A new drainage system has the course in "the best shape it has ever been in,” Rick Jurgens told Newsday.  “The greens are a lot quicker than they’ve been, a lot smoother than they’ve been in the past.”

For more on Spring Lake, check out the Thunderbird and Sandpiper flyovers.

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).]

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

Newspaper images courtesy of Brooklyn Daily Eagle via Newspapers.com

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

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

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

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 a failing golf 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

"Long Island Golf" lecture and book signing this Sunday at the Long Island Maritime Museum

Golf On Long Island's Phil Carlucci will lead a discussion on local golf history and sign copies of "Images of America: Long Island Golf" on Sunday, February 12 at the Long Island Maritime Museum in West Sayville.

The event is part of the Maritime Museum's winter lecture series.  Refreshments will be served at noon, followed by the lecture at 12:30.  Books will be available for $20.

Contact the museum to reserve a space.

For more information on the photo-history book, which contains more than 200 images of local courses, clubs and golf figures, visit the "Long Island Golf" page.

Check out "Long Island Golf" book talk and lunch in Huntington on September 28

Golf On Long Island's Phil Carlucci will talk about his book Images of America: Long Island Golf on September 28 as part of the Huntington Historical Society's "Lunch & Learn" series.  Society members and non-members are invited to attend the event, which will take place at Black & Blue Seafood Chophouse in Huntington.

The book discussion will focus on Long Island golf history, including the emergence of private and public courses, the boom and bust periods of local golf, and the many courses that were lost over the region's 125-year golf history.  Signed copies of Long Island Golf will be available for purchase.  A three-course lunch is included in the $50 admission ($45 for society members).  Reservations are required and can be made online at the Huntington Historical Society website.

Huntington's "Lunch & Learn" events are monthly discussions that combine local food with a look back at Long Island's rich history.  All lectures begin at 12 p.m. and last approximately two hours.  For a 2016-17 schedule, or for more information about the series, visit Huntington's Lunch & Learn page.

And for more information on Long Island Golf, visit the book page here at Golf On Long Island.

Golf historian Phil Young talks Bethpage Black on Scorcia On Par radio show

Anthony Scorcia, whose "On Par with Anthony Scorcia" radio show airs Saturday mornings on WGBB 1240-AM, spoke with golf and Bethpage historian Phil Young this morning to discuss the Black Course in advance of The Barclays later this month.

Young, an A.W. Tillinghast expert with several books on Bethpage and its legendary architect, spoke about his concerns regarding the Black Course's setup and its move away from the fundamental aspects of Tillinghast's original design.  Narrowed fairways and "dumbed-down" greens are an insult to the designer, he said, and have taken away from Tillinghast's masterpiece. 

"You wouldn't go into the Louvre and say, 'You know, I think Mona Lisa would be better as a blonde,'" Young said.

The Black Course will host The Barclays from August 25-28.

To listen to the entire discussion, visit the On Par with Anthony Scorcia website.

Listen to GOLI's chat about Long Island Golf on the "On Par with Anthony Scorcia" radio show

Golf On Long Island's Phil Carlucci was the featured guest on the June 25 radio broadcast of "On Par with Anthony Scorcia" to discuss the local golf scene as well as Images of America: Long Island Golf.  Listen to the full interview in the player below.

6-25-16-Phil_Carlucci

Anthony Scorcia's weekly golf radio show can be heard Saturday mornings at 8:00 a.m. on WGBB 1240.  Guests include local course pros, superintendents and golf writers, among others in the industry.  Visit the On Par with Anthony Scorcia website for more info.