True links golf is hard to come by in the U.S., especially near urban areas like New York. With few exceptions, golf courses built on sandy soil near an ocean and within commuting distance of a big city were converted into real estate or public beaches long ago. Or, in the case of the early 20^th Century masterpiece Lido Golf Club in Long Beach, NY, on the south shore of Long Island, into a crowded town beach and middle school.

        The Lido club’s genes are as impressive as those of the most iconic American golf courses. Charles Blair Macdonald, he of Yale Golf Club, National Golf Links and Greenbrier White Course fame, designed the original Lido course in 1914, assisted by Seth Raynor, with some of the holes within sand wedge distance of the ocean. Shortly after it opened, famous golf writer Bernard Darwin described Lido as “the finest golf course in the world.” (Mind you, Shinnecock Hills and the National Golf Links were already open for play.) Macdonald described the making of the course for a news article at the time, and it was preserved in Golf Illustrated magazine. (Click here to access a copy.)

When you cast your eye in certain directions at Lido Golf Club, you might think you are on a links course separated from the rest of the world.  Seconds later (below), reality sets in.

 

A Pink Lady rises from the beach

        A New York state senator named Reynolds envisioned a “paradise” country club resort on the Lido beach and acquired 186 acres adjacent to the golf course in the late 1920s. The centerpiece of Reynolds’ paradise was a huge bubble gum colored Moorish-style hotel, which became known as The Pink Lady, but the hotel was about all the senator was able to complete before the Great Depression dashed his grander plans and may

have contributed to his early death in 1931. Eventually, the hotel fell into receivership and was used by the U.S. Navy as a “discharge center” in World War II. In 1962, a new owner sold 175 acres of the resort’s property to members of the Lido Golf Club who, later, sold most of that land to the towns of Hempstead and Long Beach. (The municipalities used the land for the aforementioned public beach and school.) Robert Trent Jones was commissioned to build a new layout a quarter mile inland from the ocean and on the Reynolds Channel where the current layout opened in 1948.

        Lido has come a long way, but it has a long way to go. The golf course could be among the finest on the east coast if it weren’t for such pesky idiosyncrasies as civilization and Mother Nature. The adjacent middle school, for example, and a football field used by Long Beach High School line the 9th hole, necessitating the use of an obnoxious four-story high net to catch sliced drives. (It saved me a penalty stroke when I uncorked a wild drive, but still…) Along the southern boundary of the course is a fence that protects errant golf balls from Lido Boulevard and the modest row houses along the thoroughfare; the homes are barely an eighth of a mile from the beach, but you never see the ocean from the almost perfectly flat layout. As you make your way out toward the Reynolds Channel, which is punctuated beautifully by fingers of bright green marshland, smokestacks and other signs of commerce line the horizon. The pleasure boats that bob along the bay form a kind of odd counterpoint to the belching smokestacks and make you appreciate, even more, what the ocean views from the original Macdonald 18 must have been like.

The view to the famous Pink Lady would have been uninterrupted when it was first built in 1929.  The present day Lido Golf Club was not opened until 1948, but we like to think that the protective netting and practice range bays would not have been around to obstruct the views then, either.

 

Links golf on a budget

        If it were possible to somehow silhouette out some of the visually unappealing adjacencies, Lido would be one of the finest layouts east of the Mississippi, given that it is the product of arguably the most skilled of all the Jones boy golf architects. From what one can tell today, Jones honored the idea of links golf by imposing bunkers only where it made perfect sense and not mimicking too much the round shapes and sod faces of traps on the classic Scottish layouts. The course is unfussy, the way a true links course should be, but certainly with potential for odd bounces and alternative shot choices, especially if the wind is blowing. It is hard to know what, if any, effects the intervening 65 years has had on the bunkering around Lido, but there are few penal high lips to contend with; and the sand –- my local playing partners told me much of it is from the Atlantic beach about 600 yards away –- quite yielding to a wedge.

        I would not describe Lido Beach as a difficult golf course –- rating 71.7 and slope 122 from the blue tees at 6,522 yards –- because many of the fairways are adjacent and generous to pulled or sliced shots and, in typical links fashion, you have the prerogative –- sometimes it feels like an obligation –- to roll the ball up to the smallest of the elevated greens (more about the greens below). Of course, like any links turf, a well struck tee shot will bound down the fairway an extra 20 to 30 yards on all but the soggiest days.  But a par 5 and a par 3 among the finishing holes may have you reaching for one club, and then another, before you settle on your final choice.  More about that in the next part of the story.

Next: Great past, but what about Lido’s future?

        I had a good conversation today with a lot owner and member of the golf club at Bright’s Creek, the financially jinxed Mill Spring, NC, golf community a little less than an hour from both Greenville and Asheville. I was concerned after visiting the community’s web site and finding that interim owners who had defaulted a year ago were still listed as the “development team” at the site. I made some inquiries and left a message for the lot owner, who also had a management role at Bright’s Creek up until a few years ago.

        Bright’s Creek has been victimized by bad luck and some organizational overreaching since its 2006 debut in a rather remote section of southwest North Carolina. The community was organized by the same team that put together Forest Creek, the heralded golf development in the Pinehurst area that has been the playground of such luminaries as Michael Jordan.   Off that auspicious debut, the owners most have thought Bright’s would be another piece of cake after the acquisition of a sharply priced 5,000 acres with an array of creeks running through it and a semi-circle of ridges ringing the valley. But Forest Creek was built at a different time, and when the market began to collapse in 2007, the owners could not have imagined that this recession would take no prisoners among newly started golf communities like Bright’s Creek.

The Fazio layout at Bright's Creek uses all the elements valley and mountain terrain can offer, plus the creek itself.

 

        After an initial spurt of 330 lots, sales turnover at Brights stopped dead in 2008. The 5,000 acres, which spans a valley that straddles the eponymous creek and slopes up to a 2,000-foot-high ridgeline, were carved into 1,300 lots that probably seemed only a slightly ambitious number in 2004; in light of the events of 2008 and since, it might be decades before those additional 1,000 lots are sold. (My contact believes that the next owners will almost surely reduce the overall inventory of lots for development.)

        Ownership issues and a lack of resources have made it impossible for Bright’s Creek to do the kind of marketing it needs to be competitive. The original owners sold the community to a group from Miami in late 2011, but by the end of 2012, they were gone, unable to provide the financial resources necessary to pump new life into the development. Now, with the original owners trying to find yet another buyer, marketing and sales have both stopped dead at Bright’s Creek; what buyer, after all, is going to plunk down a couple of hundred thou for a lot in a golf community without a developer?

 

Down but not out

        That kind of history should be enough to lay low even the best-organized golf community. But Bright’s Creek has some undeniable assets going for it that could make it an investment somewhat less risky than, say, penny stocks. Although it is totally rural in nature, and it will be years before the area around it grows in any significant way, Bright’s Creek has the aforementioned impressive bit of topography that some communities would lust after. The sleek Tom Fazio golf course plays mostly across a valley wedged between those surrounding hills, making it only mild exercise for those who prefer to walk their 18 holes. The surrounding ridgelines are perfect spots for the finest future homes in the community, with views across the valley and golf course to the other surrounding mountains. At 50 miles from Asheville and 60 from Greenville, Bright’s is remote, to be sure, but any emergency supplies -– or just routine groceries -– are much more accessible at nearby Tryon and Rutherfordton.

        The golf course is a typical Tom Fazio modern design, which is to say both challenging and fun, the hazards mostly of the sandy variety, except for the stream of water that gives the course and community its name, and sporting the customary Fazio clovers and peninsulas.

 

Expect prices to drop with a new owner

        I wish I could share some prices for real estate but because the temporary owners have stopped actively selling as they prepare to turn everything over to new proprietors, there is no marketing going on (including a web site that is at least a year out of date).  But when Bright’s is sold, which my contact says could be a matter of days, weeks or, less likely, months, the new owners may have no choice but to offer lower priced lots. They will almost surely label them, accurately, “The Lowest Prices We’ve Ever Offered,” a signal for those with a little capital to risk that Bright’s time may have come.

Some of the most dramatic homes at Bright's Creek occupy the most dramatic lots, along the community's many ridgelines.