Category Archives: Architects

Golf in the Footsteps of the Three Stooges

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On Sunday, twelve of us played  Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx, one of a dozen courses owned by the city of New York. It opened the summer of 1895, six years after my home club, and is the oldest public course in the United States. It also has what may be the world’s coolest locker room, which still contains the original wooden lockers (photos above and below). The Three Stooges considered Van Cortlandt their home course. Other visitors have included Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, and my friends and me. (On Sunday, even though it was 28 degrees when we left home, three of us wore shorts.)

Sunday Morning Group, Van Cortlandt locker room, March 11, 2012.

The original Van Cortlandt golf course was built for $642.80. It had just nine holes, of which the last was more than 700 yards long. For a few years in 1960s, the city operated three ski slopes on the four short, hilly, quirky closing holes, at the southern end of the park. (You get to those holes by crossing under the Major Deegan Expressway, on a concrete walkway with tall fences on either side.) But now the golf course is just a golf course, even during the so-called winter.

Emerging from under the Major Deegan Expressway, on the way to the fifteenth tee.

Van Cortlandt was originally known as the Meadows, and it was very popular, even though in 1895 hardly anybody in America owned golf clubs or knew anything about how to hit a golf ball. In 1899, Tom Bendelow—a 30-year-old Scotsman and former typesetter, who eventually designed 650 courses in North America—expanded Van Cortlandt to 18 holes. By 1920, according to the Parks Department, it was handling 5,000 players a week.

This is what golf in America looked like in 1895, the year Van Cortlandt opened.

Bendelow’s design survived until the 1940s, when Robert Moses began building highways on top of it. Today, the course is divided into four roughly equal-size lobes. They are separated by two highways (the Major Deegan and the Mosholu Parkway) and a fence-enclosed swamp called Tibbetts Brook, which resembles the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings, except murkier.

This way across Tibbetts Brook.

On Sunday, the first of our three tee times was 7:56. That meant leaving home at a little before 6:00, which really meant leaving home at a little before 5:00, since daylight saving time had gone into effect overnight. And that, for me, meant getting up at what my brain still thought was 3:30. It was worth it, though—what else could I have done on a Sunday morning in March, except maybe work on my taxes?—and I was actually awake and waiting when my alarm went off, as I usually am the night before I play golf.

Because we were going to Van Cortlandt, we were able to lure Ferris out of hibernation. The night before, he sent us this email:

My childhood home was at 1 Tibbetts Road, in Yonkers, and our property line was Van Cortlandt Park. My friends and I used to cut holes in the chain-link fence near the fourth green and play the three holes on this side of the Major Deegan and Mosholu Parkway. We would steal the bamboo whips that the ‘parkies’ used to whip the dew off the greens, and occasionally we would also steal the flags, and we would sell golf balls. Since the approaches to some of the holes were blind, we could run out and grab balls that had just been hit and then sell them to the next groups that came by. We did all this while keeping an eye out for the parkies’ pickup trucks. When we saw them come rumbling over the hill, we would scoot back through the hole that we had cut in the fence, and then hide in the woods. The following day, the hole would be wired closed, so we always carried a heavy-duty wire-cutter in one of our golf bags. Of course, most of us had old bags, with hickory-shafted clubs. My house was about two hundred yards from the course. I’ve never paid to play at Van Cortlandt, and I’ve never played the holes on the other side of the highways.

Ferris's fence, with a modern hole, just beyond the fourth green.

For lunch, we went to the Bronx Ale House, just a few minutes away. To see what that was like, check out the photos on this (non-golfer’s) blog. Pay particular attention to the picture of the Alehouse Burger. Here was Sunday’s beer menu:

Bronx Ale House.

You can read an old New Yorker article of mine about playing winter golf in New York City here. The photo below is of the line of golfers at the first tee as we walked off the fourteenth green, on our way to the holes on the other side of the Major Deegan. There were more golfers waiting in front of the clubhouse.

Sunday Golf in Brooklyn

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Marine Park Golf Course; Brooklyn, NY; March 4, 2012; 46 degrees.

There are a dozen public courses in New York City, and they stay open all winter, as long as the ground is snow-free—as it usually is, thanks to the urban heat island effect and the proximity of the Atlantic Ocean. On Sunday, as Rory McIlroy was moving to the top of the world ranking, six members of my regular Sunday Morning Group and I drove to Brooklyn for a round at Marine Park. (Several of our favorite city courses have enticingly warm-sounding names: Marine Park, Pelham Bay, Dyker Beach.)

Marine Park is situated a few miles from J.F.K. International and a few hundred yards from Floyd Bennett Field, which was the city’s first official airport. (When Howard Hughes set a record by flying around the world in ninety-one hours, in 1938, his trip began and ended at Floyd Bennett. The old runway area is now a somewhat dystopian-looking public park and a New York Police Department helicopter base.) The golf course covers a little over two hundred acres inside the elbow formed by Flatbush Avenue and the Belt Parkway. It was designed by Robert Trent Jones and was completed in 1963—just in time for the World’s Fair, which was held virtually next door, in Queens, the following year. The holes have a genuinely linksy feel: few trees, subtly undulating topography, exasperating wind off Jamaica Bay (another warm-sounding name). There’s more broken glass in the bunkers than you’d find at Troon or Carnoustie, and the views from some of the fairways include more barges and giant dump trucks. But the greens on Sunday were fast and terrific, even though nobody had mowed them in months.

Hacker (real name), Marine Park.

In 2007, New York City accused the company that was operating Marine Park of having ties to organized crime, and revoked its lease. The new lessee is investing millions in the course, and has renovated the club house and added a driving range. We saw huge piles of topsoil alongside a number of  the fairways—raw material for improvements to come. The guy manning the cash register in the golf shop, who was also the starter, told us that the days when old car parts and toilet seats would sometimes pop up through the turf are gone.

When we’d finished our round (after playing the last few holes as a sevensome, since there were slowpokes ahead of us and no one behind), we caravaned to Pipin’s Pub, in Bay Ridge. We’ eaten lunch there before—on New Year’s Day 2008, after playing a cold, wet round at Dyker Beach—and ever since then we’d been meaning to go back, partly because almost the entire first page of the menu is devoted to various kinds of cheeseburger. The day’s winners threw all their winnings into the lunch pot, as we almost always do during the off-season, and we ended up leaving a huge tip because with seven people the arithmetic was just impossible.

Pipin's Pub. Photo taken by nice waitress with Irish accent.

More Old NYC Golf Photos

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LaTourette clubhouse long ago

In recent years, the clubhouses of several old New York City golf courses have been thoughtfully restored, renovated, and remodeled, at terrific expense. The responsible parties are American Golf Corporation, which holds twenty-year operating licenses for a number of the city’s courses, and Page Ayres Cowley, an architect with extensive experience in the restoration and adaptive reuse of historic structures.

Cowley’s first golf project was LaTourette Golf Course, on Staten Island. The course and the large wooded park surrounding it are laid out on what was once the farm of John J. Crocheron, a French Huguenot who fought in the war of 1812.  In the 1830s, Crocheron gave the property to his daughter, Ann, and her husband, David LaTourette, and moved to Alabama. Crocheron’s gift included a large Federal-style brick mansion with panoramic views of Lower New York Bay. The mansion was occupied until 1910 by a succession of LaTourettes, a number of whom came to unfortunate ends: several died in childhood, one was shot accidentally by a neighbor while wandering in delirium, one died while fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War, and one is rumored to have committed suicide by hanging himself in the attic.  The farm is thought to be one of the last in New York City to employ oxen as draft animals.  In 1928, the city bought it, for $1.14 million, and turned it into a public park, now part of the Staten Island Greenbelt.  John Van Kleek designed the golf course.  The mansion became the clubhouse in 1936, was designated an individual New York City landmark in 1968, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

LaTourette clubhouse not quite so long ago

One of the best things that ever happened to the old LaTourette mansion occurred in 2001: it caught on fire. The fire started in a wastebasket in an office on the ground floor and did extensive damage, inside and out. American Golf, which was responsible for the building’s reconstruction, awarded the project to Cowley. She told me, “When we started, it was a typical insurance claim. The adjustor said, O. K., the floor is burned, replace the floor; the plaster’s missing, put up Sheetrock; the windows are blown out, replace them with something prefab. But as we went through this, I thought, Why just put it back the way it was?”

Cowley’s firm had recently completed an award-winning five-year restoration of Walt Whitman’s final residence, in Camden, New Jersey—a modest frame house that was the poet’s home for the last eight years of his life and was the only house he ever owned.  At the Library of Congress, Cowley and her associates found old glass negatives showing interior details that had been cropped from published photographs. “Walt Whitman lived in a mess,” she told me. “There were crumpled papers everywhere, and there were dishes stacked on the window sills. The photographs we studied were taken by the artist Thomas Eakins, a good friend of his, and they helped us understand the life of a working man who lived at the poverty line and survived at the grace and favor of his publisher and his patrons.  He was a brilliant poet, and he was a cheapskate. The furniture belonged to his housekeeper, who lived in the back of the house. It didn’t matter to him if the wallpaper matched—just stick it on the wall. At one point, we told the state, which operates the house as a museum, ‘If it doesn’t match, we know it’s right.’”

Old photographs were important in the LaTourette project, too.  Cowley persuaded the insurance company to pay for architectural details it hadn’t felt were necessary, such as mahogany sashes for the windows, and to allow her, instead of replacing unused features (the showers on the second floor, for instance), to recreate elements (such as an unobstructed central hallway on the ground floor) that had been obliterated long before the fire. She also persuaded American Golf to spend nearly two million dollars of its own money.  The result is terrific—not a museum, by any means, but a living landmark that gives the city’s golfers a powerful sense of what it must have been like to visit the home of a wealthy nineteenth-century Staten Island landowner.

LaTourette clubhouse today

 

Alister MacKenzie

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Alister MacKenzie and his wife, Hilda, on the fifteenth green at Cypress Point.

Obsessive students of golf architecture should file away the latest revision of a comprehensive chronology of the life of Alister MacKenzie, the designer of Augusta National, Cypress Point, Royal Melbourne, and a number of other courses worth scheming to play. The chronology is the work of Neil Crafter and the AM Research Team, in Adelaide, Australia, and it contains contributions from many people (including, in a very small way, me). Crafter, in a cover note, writes, “Sean Tully in San Francisco and Bob Beck in Santa Cruz have been most diligent in researching Mackenzie’s time in the USA, and Bob has unearthed records from Cypress Point that show when Mackenzie stayed overnight in the clubhouse and even what he ate for his meals! It is staggering that 80 or more years on we can get down to this level of detail about the life of Alister Mackenzie.” Even if you feel you already know everything you need to know about MacKenzie’s diet, the chronology contains many interesting facts.

Incidentally, the images above and below also appear in my book The Making of the Masters, which is now selling on Amazon for practically nothing. Below is MacKenzie’s original watercolor sketch of the routing of Augusta National. In it, the holes are numbered as they are today. MacKenzie later switched the nines; the club, after the first Masters, switched them back, because the current first nine thawed first on frosty mornings. Note the 90-yard 19th hole, near the clubhouse, squeezed between the 9th and 18th greens. MacKenzie explained the idea in a letter to Clifford Roberts, the club’s founding chairman: “Bobby Jones and some of the other directors thought it might be interesting to have a real 19th hole so that the loser could have the opportunity of getting his money back by playing double or quits. This 19th Hole will be an attractive plateau green, narrow at one end where the flag will usually be placed but wide at the other end so as to give a safety route to the player who has not the courage or the skill to pitch to the narrow end of the green.” The club, in those days, didn’t have the money to build it, and Jones and Roberts, in any event, worried that it would block the view of anyone in the clubhouse who was trying to watch whatever was happening on the 18th. Cool idea, though.

February Golf

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The weather in the Northeast this winter has been unusually warm, creating unexpected golf opportunities. My home club stayed open until New Year’s Day, a record, and a few courses in our area haven’t closed at all, or have reopened. The other day, my friend Hacker (real name) and I played a round at the Links at Union Vale, in Dutchess County, New York.

The Links was founded in the late 1990s by a group of Irish golfers from the New York metropolitan area. They were fed up with the summer crowds on the city’s public courses (of which there are a dozen) and decided to build a place of their own within weekend commuting distance. Roughly eighty of them bought shares, at ten thousand dollars apiece. They found two hundred acres of cattle-grazing farmland seventy-five miles north of Manhattan, and they hired Stephen Kay and Doug Smith to design a course for them. The investors knew of Kay because he had done some work on the bunkers at Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx—the first public golf course in the United States, founded in 1895—and because he had designed an Irish-style course, called the Links of North Dakota, that they liked very much.

For the Union Vale investors, Kay and Smith built a very passable imitation of an Irish links course, and they did it for just $2.5 million—a pittance nowadays. Bull’s Bridge Golf Club, a private course that Hacker and I passed on the way to and from Union Vale, was founded at about the same time. It cost more than $20 million; has been threatened with bankruptcy on a couple of occasions; had a $1.4-million lien placed on it by its architect, Tom Fazio; is still making do with a temporary clubhouse; and costs more than a hundred thousand dollars to join. The original investors in the Links, who represent various Irish golf associations in and around New York City, allow themselves preferential tee times and charge themselves reduced fees, but their club is open to everyone and their clubhouse is well stocked with Guinness. That’s Hacker in the photo above, stuck behind an old grain silo on the fifteenth hole.