The People’s Country Club
Three centuries ago the land upon which Bethpage State Park sits was the property of three Native American tribes until English settler Thomas Powell purchased a 15-square-mile tract for all of 140 pounds sterling. Powell named the land Bethpage, inspired by the Bible. In the Book of St. Matthew in the New Testament, there is a passage that refers to drawing “nigh unto Jerusalem and were come to Bethpage, unto the Mount of Olives.”
What Powell started, Benjamin Franklin Yoakum refined. A railroad tycoon, he bought 1,300 acres of Powell’s original land purchase and developed it into a spacious estate that by 1923 included Lenox Hills Country Club. By the time of the 1929 stock market crash Yoakum had passed away and his heirs sold the land to the Bethpage Park Authority, part of the Long Island State Park Commission, in 1933 for $1 million. Robert Moses, a master builder and president of the commission, oversaw the transformation of the expansive property into a multi-use park.
Using Tillinghast’s expertise and the Works Progress Administration that gave him more than 2000 workers, Moses brought four courses on line—the Green (formerly Lenox Hills), Blue, Red and Black. Greens fees for any of the four courses were $1 on weekdays, $2 weekends. A season pass good for weekday golf cost $15.
The Black Course was special from the beginning; Moses hailed it as “the People’s Country Club.” Rees Jones, who inherited the moniker of “Open Doctor” from his father, Robert Trent, said that Tillinghast was inspired by
Pine Valley, which is still frequently ranked as the nation’s finest layout and this goes some way to explaining the difficult nature of Bethpage Black.
“The Black Course,” Jones said, “was quite clearly Tillinghast’s answer to Pine Valley in look and style of play. He was known to play there quite a bit. You see that especially with the bunkers. They are long, deep and massive, and they are pushed away from the greens, leaving long bunker shots, which are very difficult.”
The accompanying clubhouse also was built at the time with WPA funds and workers before a fifth course, the Yellow, designed by Alfred Tull, was added in 1958.
It’s ironic that the WPA’s contributions to golf intersected with the “Golden Age” of golf course design, the period from roughly 1910 to 1937 when many of America’s greatest golf courses were born. Among them were Pebble Beach, Oakmont, Cypress Point, Winged Foot, Oakland Hills and National Golf Links of America. Include Bethpage Black and Prairie Dunes in that mix.
With so many working-age men having gone off to fight in World War II or working in war production jobs, the WPA was discontinued in 1943 at Roosevelt’s recommendation. Operations in most states ended February 1, 1943 and the agency itself closed by the end of June. But the legacy of the WPA thrives, as golfers can well attest. Today, 300,000 rounds are played annually on the five layouts at Bethpage alone. As sports historian and author George B. Kirsch wrote, “For golfers, the cloud of this great economic crisis contained a silver lining.”