Last Shot at New Golf in Greater Hamptons

When an 18-hole golf club—private and exclusive—opens in the next couple of years at the controversial Lewis Road luxury development in East Quogue, it will mark the latest and probably the last of 135 years of links building on and around the South Fork of Long Island. This will bring to 20 the number of golfing options, not including some favorites on the North Fork.

But long before it got to No. 20, the Hamptons made history with No. 1.

Shinnecock Hills, oldest incorporated golf club in the U.S., was the start of a first-wave of “summer colony” courses to populate the stretch.  It took its name—and some say its land—from a native tribe that arguably had been hornswoggled by settlers decades earlier. But Shinnecock’s pedigree with golf professionals is solid—it will host its fourth U.S. Open tournament in 2026.

With the extended Long Island Rail Road opening up the territory to a new seasonal population, other courses followed in short order in the 1890s: the Westhampton Country Club (relocated in 1915), Quogue Field Club, Southampton Golf Club, the Maidstone Club in East Hampton and Gardiners Bay Country Club on Shelter Island. A decade later came National Golf Links, neighboring Shinnecock Hills on the Peconic Bay side.

The next burst of course creation occurred in the Roaring Twenties.  The Bridgehampton Club opened nine holes near that village, south of the Montauk Highway.  Soon, nine holes were carved out of woodlands east of Sag Harbor for a public club (today Sag Harbor Golf Course is operated by the state of New York). Another “executive” course, the Shelter Island Golf Club, was opened to general play. And in 1927, Carl Fisher’s grand resort vision for Montauk featured the initial iteration of today’s celebrated Downs layout.

As noted in William Quinn’s pictorial history, “America’s Linksland: A Century of Long Island Golf” (2002), several of the coastal courses were heavily damaged in the September 1938 hurricane that struck the area. The Quogue club lost a few holes and ultimately shortened to nine. Shinnecock Hills, meantime, had to shift some holes that once straddled the railroad tracks northward as the Sunrise Highway was extended into town.

New links activity went quiet for decades, awakened only by the golf craze of the 1960s. First came nine new public holes at Poxabogue in Sagaponack, in 1962. The membership course at Noyac Golf Club signaled new wealth in the mid-‘60s, inland from an old bay boating hamlet and existing, it says, as a “hidden gem” for years until a course redesign. (Noyac is the course depicted in the early-March photo.)

Meanwhile, tucked away in a forest of upper Westhampton, Hampton Hills Country Club opened in 1965.  Remarkably, given later battles over the surrounding Pine Barrens, it attracted little controversy. (However, later proposals to build hundreds of homes along the course and by the Teamsters union to build 2,000 homes on property it held nearby did not fly.)   Completing this era, Suffolk County in 1972 created Indian Island Golf Course around what had been a huge Riverhead duck farm.

Even then, however, the great change in the Hamptons was yet to come.  One indication is a June 1964 advertisement in the East Hampton Star for the Montauk course: $4 green fees and “No Waiting for Starting Times.”  Ownership would later shift to New York—and today it’s $86 for out-of-staters and a lot of luck could get you a prime spot on the tee.

A last push for golfing rights on the South Fork would be seen after the great Hamptons rush of the 1980s. By then, land values had begun to skyrocket—it’s generally accepted that at least 125 acres is needed for 18 holes—while a natural-resources lobby had grown unhappy to see fertilized grass stretches take the place of native terrain. Projects were floated for spots like an old stock farm in North Haven, only to fizzle.

Several golf-developer visions of the later 1900s failed to pass muster in the area, as local or state parklands or open space were approved instead.  One of the last such efforts to die, in 1999, was at Montauk’s ocean-facing Camp Hero, a former federal installation given over instead to the public as rustic day-use grounds.

The increasingly vocal resistance complicated the founding of the next 18-hole course to open, the private Atlantic Golf Club in upper Bridgehampton. After a long battle over the 200 acres of onetime potato farm, with both competing developers and foes of any repurposing, Atlantic members—many of them from the South Fork’s growing Jewish community–realized their aims in 1992.

Almost a decade later and two miles up Millstone Road, another tussle ensued over the former Bridgehampton Raceway site on a rise overlooking Noyac Bay. Again, various interests including nature lovers sought to control the parcel. Ultimately the racetrack’s last impresario, Robert Rubin, put together an exclusive golf resort, The Bridge, to accompany a handful of fancy home sites. Rubin’s plans were sufficiently restrained to overcome opposition. But the approvals came just before the Community Preservation Fund, an East End tax designed to allow towns to compete for valuable and sensitive properties, could kick in enough to vie for the scenic site.

Meantime, an 18-hole membership course had opened in the agricultural belt above Amagansett with few fireworks. The South Fork Country Club, however, had the benefit of history. The locally prominent Bistrian family created a public 9-holer, the East Hampton Golf Course, on its farm plot there in 1978, before the landscaping graders became such a sore point. A new membership simply expanded to 18 and took charge in 2000.

The most recent course to open on the South Fork, Sebonack Golf Club in 2006, also avoided serious resistance. This may be explained by its location and pedigree: It adjoins the National Golf Links on what had been Bayberry Land, a banking magnate’s compound going back to 1919 and subsequently a retreat for the IBEW electricians union.  Michael Pascucci spearheaded Sebonack’s creation with a “green” sensibility and ceded a long stretch of waterfront to Southampton town for conservation purposes. (With today’s polarized times, this has not satisfied all objections.)

In the nearly 20 years since, more affluent golfers have descended on the South Fork, with few openings for play. But development issues have only become more fractious and legally bound. So it’s no surprise that future golf prospects come in the form of a highly contested project.  Lewis Road, formerly known as The Hills, is to be part of a 100-some home project over nearly 600 acres of woodland south of the Sunrise Highway. (See below for a shot of the site as of end of November 2024.) Just to its north are hundreds of protected acres of the Pine Barrens, and indeed the Long Island Pine Barrens Society was an early foe of the whole plan.

The current iteration of the project is four years old, and an earlier, similar blueprint failed after that long of a fight. But Discovery Land, the developer, has prevailed at all stops so far this time, and construction looms.

As hard fought as each additional golf hole has been in recent years, there’s likely plenty of demand to keep all the existing courses busy for Long Island’s eight-month active seasons. Thus, even with a generally-aging player population and high land values, closure of any of them for developments is a political nonstarter. (Increasingly, the bigger clubs have had to house maintenance workers on site, because nearby rental shelter is so dear.)

Reversion to nature preserves, as has happened elsewhere as golf supply exceeded demand, is an economic leap too far in the Hamptons.  But there can be ancillary outdoor uses—the Southampton Trails Preservation Society has pitched an “accessible” visitor path on the donated bayfront stretch next to Sebonack, and created an unusual hike in the watershed of the Atlantic club. Enthusiasts asked for a trail as part of the Lewis Road project.

In years past, ample winter snowfalls created cross-country skiing possibilities on gently sloping fairways, but such cover has become rare on the South Fork. If anything, the warmer bridge seasons have brought more golf to a place that won’t be seeing any more spots to accommodate it. –March 15, 2024 and updated.

YIMBY Can Populate Conference Halls

This weekend’s New York Times article marvels over the apparent embrace of New Urbanist notions of densified and commercially active housing corridors by a seemingly fresh breed of market-oriented libertarians. They have come together under various banners of YIMBY–Yes In My Back Yard–to address a scarcity of “affordable” homes in many areas of the country. What the Times calls red-state Republicans are in fact policy wonks and some homebuilder allies who are channeling longtime philosophical objections to zoning and related restrictions on land use. New Urbanists often draw on Jane Jacobs but are civic planners to their core. The pairing of these traditionally opposing camps (they still are basically at odds over laws that set metropolitan “growth boundaries” or require subsidies within projects for low-income residents) is worthy of note. But as a political force, it is yet to advance beyond a few blue-state legislatures. At ground level, localities from Boston to San Diego are resisting changes in single-family-only zones that keep neighborhoods of a certain flavor (and price). This resistance itself is an amalgam of ideologies–from many of those “red state Republicans” to affluent professionals with Biden-Harris signs in their landscaped front yards. Maybe the phenomenon identified by the Times is one more example of shifting political currents in the country, although it does not reflect class divisions in the way other reorientations do. It really comes down to a simpler old adage: Where you stand depends on where you sit.

Ruptured Democracy? Add a Think Tank

A full-page advertisement (there are still a few!) in today’s print New York Times salutes an act of philanthropy but is full of ironies.

The gift is $59 million from the HMO fortune of Leonard Schaeffer and his wife to the University of Southern California, for establishment of a (named for him) Institute for Public Policy & Government Service at USC’s “campus” (building) in Washington D.C.

“Confidence in our political system and our ability to protect democracy are at historic lows,” the ad reads. The gift “will establish a coast-to-coast think tank for bolstering our democracy.” The institute will “train new leaders,” conduct research to “advance public policy proven to improve citizens’ lives” and “serve as a nexus” for “public and private sector leaders, researchers, policy experts and elected officials to exchange ideas and solve global issues.”

So: Another glass-walled urban hive of modern America’s well-degreed class to formulate thinking about why so many of their fellow countrymen do not share the democratic propositions embraced by this elite. This does not seem likely to move the ball in 2024 and thereafter.

For all I know, USC trustee Schaeffer, who was the founding chairman and CEO of Wellpoint, is a worthy citizen–“a recognized expert and published author in health economies and health policy”–and means to contribute here. But with a fortune that derives from the medical-financial sector (Wellpoint is now called Elevance) that has helped alienate so many among the disaffected millions in the U.S., he isn’t the ideal benefactor of a forum for repairing deep social divisions.

Huge naming donations to richly endowed universities are another symbol of the rupture between the establishment and the estranged. Even with $59 million, this latest platform for proper civic intercourse may reach “coast to coast,” but will struggle to connect with a lot of what’s between. –March 3, 2024

A Twilight Strategy on Hong Kong

The grim progression of bloody autocrats in major as well as lesser quarters of the globe can make for personal and political paralysis here in the U.S. When Alexei Navalny is snuffed out in Russia and Vladimir Putin grinds on to occupy Ukraine, or when Xi Jinping stamps out dissent in greater China and pursues dissenters in their escapes, what is left for American “friends of freedom” to do?

That was on the table this week at a lunch I attended in New York City with two dozen others from news media or NGOs that support independent reporting. Hong Kong was the specific focus. Increasingly pro-Beijing officials there have trampled on longstanding rule-of-law protections for speech, and the worsening restrictions have swept up hundreds to jail and already (along with uncoincidental economic woes) led hundreds of thousands to leave the once-great city.

We talked mainly about Jimmy Lai, the 76-year-old former publisher of Apple Daily, the tabloid that the Chinese Communist Party most needed to–and forcibly did–shut down. The ailing but (according to his longtime aide Mark Simon, who was with us) still-earnest Lai has been locked up for three years now on trumped-up charges while the Hong Kong authorities orchestrate his main event: a show trial for violating the “national-security law” imposed there in 2020 and widened since.

Blessedly, remnants of pre-Communist Hong Kong have formed support organizations for Lai and other dissidents, most notably the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation. Its president, author-journalist and ex-civic leader Mark Clifford, also addressed our gathering, held under the auspices of the Overseas Press Club.

We discussed the importance of lending continued independent media ears to Hong Kong’s stifled voices, even as China’s rulers seek to cite contact with Western interests as evidence of collusive sedition. More broadly, it is helpful to spotlight constantly the role of outside business, institutions and governments–especially the U.K.–in their interactions with a repressive Hong Kong and, of course, its Chinese masters. Beijing is bothered by the attention–this is why opposing sounds are silenced.

Many of us personally renounced our onetime links to Hong Kong long ago, but that of course was an empty proclamation. What is more meaningful is a sturdy chronicling of the suffering of those who remained under the tyrant’s lash (including Jimmy Lai, who chose to stay) and of the predations of a dictator and system with eyes on another target, Taiwan. The weight of world opinion is not enough at any particular point to force evil back, but ultimately it can bend history. The first order now is to deny cover to complicity with the thugs. —Feb. 23, 2024

He Comes to Bury the Tax Cutters

Michael J. Graetz long ago established himself as a nettle in the side of those who promote lower tax rates for economic growth–in recent times what’s known as a “supply-side” agenda. Today Princeton University Press publishes the Ivy League law professor’s book chronicling the last 45 years of that cause, “The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America.” He traces the origin of the modern antitax push to Howard Jarvis’ finally-successful (in 1978) crusade to cut and limit property taxes in California. To Graetz’s credit, he has sophisticated awareness of tax politics, more than most Washington Beltway pundits. For one thing, he recognizes the role of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and even begins the book with a quotation from my former boss there, the late Robert L. Bartley. Graetz acknowledges what his adversaries were on to, and even concedes that some supply-side response to the stagflation of the late 1970s was “probably necessary.” His jaundiced view of tax-cutting legislation has undeniable elements of truth: much of the horse-trading was about gains for purely special interests, and the unwillingness to reduce the reach of government while cutting levies to pay for it has spawned enormous deficits. (The Laffer Curve for identifying when lower rates bring more revenues has been spongy in application—politicians and advocates aren’t inclined to find the apex and stop there.) As a result, tax policy has helped to foster greater inequality of result in America, whatever else it did.  A shrewd defender of progressive, broad-based taxation should stop there—and perhaps acknowledge that the wealthy in more socialist societies abroad also find plenty of loopholes. Unfortunately, Graetz doesn’t offer even-handedness, instead making gratuitous political swipes that serve only to pigeonhole him as one more attack dog of the left. There’s the accusation of racial animus as a motivation for tax cutters (as a way to strike at black beneficiaries of the welfare state—but then what explains Jack Kemp?). There are numerous digs at peripheral right-wing figures, and of course at Donald Trump. (And when Trump’s 2017 tax bill aims to remove a break for the rich—the SALT deduction—he dismisses it as a slam on blue states.) There’s even a harkening back to the fall of Alger Hiss!  Yes, in politics common cause is made with assorted forces whose agendas are ancillary to your own, and supply–side economists were no exception. U.S. tax policy is hard to separate from the right vs. left wars. That’s the reason Graetz’s book, for all its nitty-gritty on form 1040, bears a supportive blurb from the president of the ACLU. –Feb. 13, 2024

Chase Is Happy to Be ‘Just Another Bank’

This Wall Street Journal article of the past week spotlights the unusual (for today) strategy of opening numerous bank branches by the nation’s largest such financial institution, J.P Morgan Chase. It comes at a time when most other banks are retreating from the branch ubiquity approach, something many had embraced in urban areas not 15 years before–when New Yorkers often complained that a favorite storefront had been replaced by “just another bank.” It also comes as consumer banking in the U.S. and especially abroad is increasingly conducted online and among younger patrons by phone app. Chase–perhaps influenced by the success that upstart rivals like Capital One and TD banks as well as credit unions have had in marketing their customer-friendliness–believes the human contact is a pathway to provision of high-margin services to banking clients. The Journal reporter contrasts Chase’s stance with that of another giant, Bank of America. A starker comparison might be to Citibank, a New York City institution which today has no branch east of Holbrook on Long Island. That leaves 65 miles of some of the biggest wallets around (think the Hamptons) to the likes of Chase.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/jpmorgan-chase-bank-branches-expansion-cc7973dc

Hamptons Farmland: A Death and a Legacy

A significant but underappreciated aspect of the South Fork of Long Island land-preservation story is the role that old farming families have played. This is particularly true of the Polish clans that so prominently figured in the agricultural belt below the moraine that runs along the Water Mill to Bridgehampton stretch, some of the most picturesque and familiar to Hamptons visitors because it follows much of the “back road” that travelers take to avoid congestion on the main highway (County Road 39 and state route 27). In some cases these Poles emerged from early immigrant labor in the fields and mills to owning large blocks of rich soil that became even richer real estate as the 20th Century progressed. That saga was in view this week with the death of Joan B. Zaluski at age 93–she was matriarch to one significant brood and widow to locally prominent William Zaluski Jr. As several of these farm families sold their parcels from the 1960s on, to avoid inheritance taxes and to take advantage of the Hamptons land rush, the Zaluskis kept much of their holding–including a landmark farmhouse on Deerfield Road–and were key participants in efforts to maintain vestiges of the former character of the South Fork. This 1999 newsletter from the Peconic Land Trust, which has been instrumental in much of that preservation, noted their milestone in that effort.

Losing the Virtue of Volunteerism

The Wall Street Journal last week published this ungenerous review of Chris Anderson’s new book, Infectious Generosity. And I can’t say the critic was wrong to zing the boss of TED Talks for “embarrassing naivete” in his plea for more universal kindness. But after reading the work and listening to Anderson make his case to a sympathetic audience at New York’s Players Club, I’d make a separate point. Most of his talk and much of the book is about monetary gifts. Basically, he’d like all of us and particularly the wealthy to tithe and if we did it would raise enough trillions to address all global needs. Money is what made the mostly-free TED broadcast of ideas to the planet possible; Anderson sold his Future publishing company in the dot-com bubble and funded a foundation that grew TED. But riches aren’t the only thing for humanity to share. His book does note several other qualifying acts, including the old-fashioned virtue of volunteering. Being a highly “social” sort, he emphasizes the positive vibes transmitted through the online (self-) promotion of good deeds, and surely that is a major (and underappreciated) aspect of today’s internet content. However, most volunteer efforts even in this web era are done quietly, through countless community organizations that, at best, get an occasional photograph in the local tribune. (America has long excelled at this public spiritedness, as Tocqueville famously ascribed to “little platoons.”) Many give of their time and labor without compensation–even, ahem, mere unmonetized bloggers are engaged in a form of this when creating “content.” Long as the history of volunteerism is, though, its core is not entirely secure. The shrinkage and in some cases collapse of service and fraternal organizations across the U.S.–part of the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon–deprives us of a significant source of these efforts. Especially is this true in what are called “marginalized” areas. Maybe the contemporary substitutes that Anderson highlights–great fortunes for philanthropy, and viral “sharing” of individual kindnesses–are enough to cover the civic gap that’s forming. In keeping with his stretched optimism, I will so stipulate.

‘Infectious Generosity’ Review: Giving Until It Feels Good – WSJ

Long Island Supe Wants to Build

Even with diminished editorial resources, like most “dailies,” Newsday remains often the only public-affairs coverage resource for much of its home base of Long Island, N.Y. So this week it reported the striking pledge of the new town supervisor in Brookhaven to open up housing development there. Republican Dan Panico said he would seek to eliminate approval-process steps that could cut the lead time for subdivisions by a year and free existing owners to add accessory units with just a checkoff. In hamlets such as Yaphank and Medford, that could mean a last frontier for mid-range (but still expensive) home building in Suffolk County, where barriers to growth are high. Parts of the town are within a 45-minute drive–with favorable traffic–of employment spots on the privileged East End (Hamptons) as well as long-settled communities to the west. Vast stretches of Brookhaven are reserved as natural-resource areas such as pine barrens and estuaries, as well as for the 5,265-acre grounds of the eponymous national laboratory there, but it offers enough recently rural land to move the needle on local housing supply. (Already, one such project has gone ahead.) As important, Panico’s promise suggests a “YIMBY” political openness that no longer exists in most of the surrounding areas. Timing may be opportune: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul still wants to extend carrots to localities blessing “affordable” development, although she has pulled back from sticks that suburban interests resisted last year. The Democrat–who lost Long Island in her tight election race in 2022–may find common cause with the GOP upstart there.

https://www.newsday.com/long-island/towns/brookhaven-supervisor-dan-panico-jzrqopak

UPDATE April 7, 2006–As this week’s Newsday article spells out, the Brookhaven development rollout is likely to include an enormous amount of warehouse space to service eastern Long Island.

Trashy People in Fancy Zip Codes

Litter and large-scale refuse dumping is a continuing–perhaps even worsening–problem in the towns of Southampton and East Hampton, N.Y., as this week’s article in the local Star reports. As more McMansion residents accumulate more furnishings, go through more food wrappings in their industrial-scale kitchens and collect more yard waste from their lavish grounds, the potential offload increases. That’s compounds a landfill problem on all of Long Island, raising costs and probably leading corner-cutters of all income strata to toss their debris wherever they think they can hide it. Often that’s in one of the nature preserves, though usually not where there are active trails and hikers to keep watch and clean up. That’s a good reason to expand the trail network as much as possible–a generally accepted notion these days, even if it was decidedly not when the Hamptons hiking enthusiasts got going in the 1980s. “Tragedies of the commons” are fewer when there’s stewardship, and civic groups can provide that when given the responsibility. Of course, they can’t well perform law enforcement, but from the comments in the Star piece, neither in the case of abandoned trash can the towns.

https://www.easthamptonstar.com/villages/202414/talking-trash-dumping-hotspots