From the Golf Journal Archives - Van Cortlandt Park Remembered...
Nov 20, 2009
By Art Tobias
(Note: This article originally appeared in the July 1989 issue of Golf Journal.)
“…The daffodils who entertain at Angelo’s and Maxie’s.
When a Broadway baby says goodnight, it’s early in the morning.
Manhattan babies don’t sleep tight until the dawn.
Goodnight, baby, goodnight, milkman’s on his way;
Sleep tight, baby, sleep tight, let’s call it a day…”
“Lullaby of Broadway” –
Harry Warren and Al Rubin
The last stop is 242nd Street – New York City’s IRT Broadway Express. Golf clubs over your shoulder, out on the street, turn east – and there’s Van Cortlandt Park public golf course. The ride cost a nickel, 1935 prices because it was 1935. I was just a kid of 21, and this was America 54 years ago.
It’s early in the morning. With you on the train were night workers, couples coming home from dates – maybe a Broadway show and a late dinner and a romantic walk afterward – and there was a drunk or two, and other golfers. No matter how early or late, other golfers were aboard the subway, some already picking up a match on the train, and all with the same intent – be there first!
Wherever you entered the train, you always made your way to the front car. Absolutely. It was essential to be near the exit when the doors opened. Every golf bag from the first car to the last represented a potential threat, holding the power to drop you to a later start should it beat you to the sign-in window.
The train arrives. Careful. Not too obvious; a little dignity. Walk, never run, but don’t let anyone get ahead. C’mon now. Move!
On your way to the clubhouse, if it’s one of those before-dawn outings, the quiet is gorgeous. The bright stars and moon light the sky, and just breathe the fresh, clean exhilarating air. Cherish the moment. It will fade too quickly.
WHETHER ONE reaches the first tee of a public course by subway, train, bus, auto, or Piper Cub, you may be assured that the race for first in line is being repeated at hundreds of settings throughout the country. Yet not many patrons of Van Cortlandt Park know the course occupies a unique niche in American golf. It is said to be the first public course in this country.
There are those who claim golf was played in 1786 at a South Carolina Golf Club, in Charleston, but that private club no longer exists, and some say the oldest among those still operating is St. Andrews, then a private course in Yonkers, New York, that goes back to 1888. Van Cortlandt Park wasn’t far behind St. Andrews. Why not? Public golf had to start somewhere, even in the North Bronx.
One may wonder now whether many of us in the 1930s were aware of what our Van Cortlandt stood for. Did we know – let alone care – about its place in history? Could we have even given a hoot about the heritage of golf itself?
History was here, tradition was here, and there we were, taking everything for granted, scarcely conscious that all this was a very special thing. Who would have guessed then that the game we were playing might perhaps be among the last such endeavors to retain their decency and integrity?
Maybe we were too young to respect tradition, and perhaps 1935 was a little too early for us to think in such lofty terms. We were young. The Eagle Golf Management Company, now operating Van Cortlandt and benefitting from hindsight, knows better. Witness their promotional slogan: “Come play the tradition.”
Newcomers should be excused for knowing only a little of golf’s past, but what about those of us who began way back when? At 75, I realize now that many of us weren’t aware of who had been responsible for our own small piece of history – when and how Van Cortlandt had come about, to say nothing of who had laid out the course in the first place.
Controversy surrounded Tom Bendelow, its architect, who was recognized as a fine course designer while he lived, but whose talents have been belittled after his death. His design of Van Cortlandt has been assigned dates from 1895 to 1899. Aside from that minor debate, Bendelow posthumously seemed the prey of a very bad press. He was portrayed as having lacked talent, and guilty of gross incompetence and deceitfulness. He was represented as a scoundrel and a charlatan, a man who skillfully bamboozled clients into believing he was something he wasn’t.
As the criticism went, Bendelow would bring a load of stakes to the site, and set out on foot, placing the first stake at the first hole’s likely tee area, then walking a certain number of yards and placing the second stake at the site for a hazard. Off he’d go, finally planting a third stake for the green. This would go on for 18 holes, and he would leave guidelines for construction. Grab the money, sometimes as little as 25 dollars, and take off. It has been said he could several courses a day if he started early enough.
AT FIRST GLANCE, Van Cortlandt’s early and middle holes seem to support the argument of Bendelow’s critics. He headed north with his armload of stakes, posting holes one through six, then reversed direction for holes seven through 12, directly beside the first six.
Detractors be damned – now comes the magic as anyone who has played the final six will concur. Van Cortlandt is known fondly for the gem-like Hill Holes.
Across the road and still proceeding south, the 13th rises on a slant to a lofty height, an engaging and well-done par-4. Then east and west atop a plateau with its own hills and valleys come four short, artfully conceived par-3s and par-4s, with a dramatic view of the North Bronx, Yonkers, and the top of the Palisades, a view that is eclipsed only by the vista from the outdoor Classic Hall of Fame Colonnade of the Bronx Community College – formerly Uptown NYU – the highest point in the borough.
Finally, the 18th hole, a par-3 that falls steeply down to the clubhouse. These are six lovely finishing holes that can hold their own anywhere, even with some private establishments.
Golfers who can’t afford to play at private clubs should offer thanks for the Van Cortlandts of the nation. Yet even in the 1930s more courses were needed. During those Depression years, golf nonetheless attracted countless players – far more than available courses could handle.
On a fine Sunday in the 1930s, it was not unusual to wait five hours to begin your round, and six more to finish it. Overcrowding was the villain. Public golf and slow play are handmaidens. The saving grace is and was the cost. You could play Van Cortlandt in the 1930s for $10 – and that was for the entire season. A $15 permit allowed you to play any city course any day of the year.
YESTERDAY’S PRICES defy belief. Going beyond that nickel subway ride, the first set of golf clubs I bought, matching Bobby Cruikshank woods and irons, plus putter, cost $45. They made me proud on the subway to Van Cortlandt (today I’d be lucky to still have them when I arrived there).
Golf balls, perhaps not the very best, went for as little as a quarter. Macy’s had a beauty, the Supremacy, which we – my City College of New York teammates and I – promptly dubbed Super-Macy. These came singly, in little square boxes, for 39 cents each.
I still shudder when I remember back to the opening drive at Van Cortlandt with one of those new Super-Macy’s. A high fence flanking the right side of the hole separated the first hole from a roadway running parallel. The road was out of bounds. Thirty-nine cents may not seem like much now, but a young man during the Depression just did not want to see a new golf ball bounding down the roadway. (To keep the records straight, we also bought golf equipment at the course – a classic example of loyalties divided between the local professional and the store where several of us worked during the Christmas holidays.)
VAN CORTLANDT was home base for our City College golf team. Earlier, a few of us had played Van Cortlandt from George Washington High School, practicing and holding our home matches there. Now at City College we were grown up, much less ragtag (or so we thought), and ever so much more worldly with CCNY Varsity stenciled on our white Sunday carry-bags.
Worldly? Now it can be told – so many years have passed that no one will be hurt. Our Number One man was a ringer. Through the machinations of our cunning and unscrupulous manager – his connivery unknown to the rest of us or to the university authorities – the Metropolitan Public Links Champion was supposedly taking Public Speaking I in evening session. Only later we learned he had never set foot on the uptown or downtown CCNY campuses.
Golf, however, was neither a major sport nor an official one. The manager just fielded the best team possible.
When we left the Bronx for our matches, it was usually to private, lush, and occasionally famous sites – Hudson River Country Club, for instance, where we played the faculty from year to year. Imagine what it was like for us kids to match strokes against such sports figures such as Nat Holman, the great basketball coach, and Benny Friedman, the football coach, or to compete with New York University at Elmsford, in Westchester, whose professional was Phil Turnesa. We were impressionable.
Still, it was no letdown to return to good ol’ Van Cortlandt. We were comfortable there, we belonged, and it was a place we could afford.
PUBLIC GOLF was making great strides at this time; after-work leagues were just beginning, and golf was no longer limited to the precious, privileged few. More Fords and Chevys adorned Van Cortlandt’s parking lot than Packards or Studebakers.
Indeed, one four-ball of elderly gentlemen showed up several times each week from nearby Mt. Vernon, riding their bicycles. They would stash their two-wheelers safely behind the clubhouse while they played.
The subway, though, was more common than cars or bicycles; indeed, it was the cheapest mode of transportation, and this was a time when watching one’s pennies was very much a part of the national thinking.
Looking back, however, lack of money was not the sole reason for playing Van Cortlandt. Its informality was appealing, but mostly it was Van Cortlandt’s accessibility – celebrities, surely affluent to some degree, often showed up, perhaps out of convenience.
Ben Grauer, an ABC newscasting luminary, played Van Cortlandt frequently. Those old enough may remember Grauer’s broadcasts of New Year’s Eve when the midnight ball dropped from a pole at Times Square, in New York City.
Primo Carnera, the heavyweight boxing champion, visited Van Cortlandt often, lumbering down the steep incline toward the 18th green, looking for all the world like an uprooted tree. You would never guess this giant of a man was gentle and gracious outside the boxing ring.
THE UNDERWORLD can scarcely be considered a group celebrity – and it may just be hearsay – but a small consortium of players showed up from time to time, and the word was out that they were more than just, well, golfers. They arrived and departed in big, black touring cars, and they brought their own caddies.
They played regularly out of very large golf bags, which (it was whispered somewhat furtively) may have contained more than just a straightforward set of woods and irons. No one ever asked to examine their bags. Whatever their lineage, these gentlemen were models of decorum. They never even gambled, as far as any of us could tell. They were just people playing golf at Van Cortlandt.
Harry Richman, a Broadway entertainer, would also run up to Van Cortlandt regularly for nine holes, although his estate out in Flushing was directly alongside Clearview, another city public course. Van Cortlandt was easier to reach from downtown New York.
Richman may have been a Broadway show-business type, but the best of all, by far, were the Broadway showgirls, appearing at Van Cortlandt with the first rays of sunlight to help brighten our landscape. The young singers and dancers from George Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing, Arthur Schwartz’s and Howard Dietz’s The Bandwagon, and The Follies, ignored the claim made in the song “Lullaby of Broadway” that “when Broadway babies say goodnight, it’s early in the morning, and Manhattan babies don’t sleep tight until the dawn…”
To the contrary, they played golf rather than seeking slumber. We found these ladies not only a joy to be near, but, as a group, not at all averse to instruction. How quickly we became instructors, we worldly men of CCNY.
Van Cortlandt was our Promised Land. And it was the Promised Land for those with and without, the scratch player and the 30 handicapper, the old and the young. Had you come along just a trifle before us, you might have seen a future PGA Tour and Senior Tour hero laying the groundwork for his skills. Whacking his ball with a cut-down club from the clubhouse to the 12th green and back was tiny Douglas Ford, scarcely old enough to walk when he practiced at Van Cortlandt.
Even though none of us achieved Ford’s fame, Van Cortlandt was our beginning, too. Sadly, college wasn’t forever, and as everything good must, it all had to end sometime. We scattered, some of us perhaps never again to see Van Cortlandt.
It is said that you can’t go home again. You can’t go back. Perhaps it wasn’t front-row orchestra – that is, a Pebble Beach or an Oakmont. Perhaps it could have been more lush, or quiet, or marvelously cared for. Yet all of us found Van Cortlandt a wondrous place, steeped in tradition, where a centuries-old game was played. It was a parcel of land that – through astute management – has thus far resisted being torn apart and replaced by shopping malls, supermarkets, and condominiums.
Many of Van Cortlandt’s devotees are their own monitors, and will continue their own caretaking. They’ll keep it a place where sportsmanship should prevail, and rowdiness and bad manners will not take over.
Van Cortlandt can be proud. Those of us who find our own Van Cortlandts are among the fortunate.
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No matter how early or late, other golfers were aboard the subway, some already picking up a match on the train, and all with the same intent – be there first! (USGA Museum)
We found these ladies not only a joy to be near, but, as a group, not at all averse to instruction. How quickly we became instructors, we worldly men of CCNY. (USGA Museum)
Primo Carnera, the heavyweight boxing champion, visited Van Cortlandt often, lumbering down the steep incline toward the 18th green, looking for all the world like an uprooted tree. You would never guess this giant of a man was gentle and gracious outside the boxing ring. (USGA Museum)
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