On a warm winter afternoon in 2005, Hacker (real name) and I met at Clearview Park Golf Course, in Queens, for my second round of the day. (I’d played that morning at Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx.) The temperature was close to fifty degrees, and the course was packed, mostly with Koreans, who are probably the second most golf-addled ethnic group in New York, after the Irish. The starter, who was also Korean, paired Hacker and me with two Korean men. One of them turned out to be the retired owner of a Manhattan wig shop. He told me that his clientele had included many famous actresses, among them Nancy Sinatra and Ann-Margret, but that actresses are undesirable wig customers because they don’t like to pay. The best customers, he said, are strippers, who favor huge blond wigs and don’t care what anything costs. We finished our round just as a very orange sun was setting beyond Manhattan, and we watched endless ribbons of white and red car lights unspooling across the Throgs Neck Bridge, which looms over the northern end of the course. Six days later, it snowed again. The photos above and below were taken at Clearview in the thirties or forties.
