The Working Man's Country Club: NYC's Four-Borough Muni Circuit
The New York golf conversation follows a familiar script.
Winged Foot. Shinnecock. Bethpage Black. National Golf Links. The conversation that happens in wood-paneled rooms and on private jets, where initiation fees have commas and the word "public" means something different than it does everywhere else.
But there's another New York golf circuit. It runs through four boroughs, costs about the same as a decent dinner, and has been serving the city's working golfers for over a century. It doesn't get the magazine covers. It doesn't need them.
This is the circuit: Dyker Beach, Forest Park, Marine Park, and Silver Lake. Four courses, four boroughs, one idea — that golf belongs to everybody.
Dyker Beach — Brooklyn (1897)
Before there was a Dyker Heights with Christmas lights and brownstones, there was a marsh. The Canarsee Indians called it common land — too swampy to farm, too wet to build on. The Dutch settlers agreed. Brooklyn bought the first parcel in 1895 and the Olmsted firm sketched a vision for "the only seaside park in Greater New York."
By the late 1890s, a private club called Dyker Meadow Golf Club was playing a 9-hole layout on that filled marshland. It went public in 1935 with a John Van Kleek clubhouse and an 18-hole layout that's still the bones of what you play today.
Dyker Beach is the second-oldest public course in New York City, behind only Van Cortlandt in the Bronx. It's parkland golf with harbor breezes — tree-lined, straightforward, the kind of course where you can walk 18 after work and still make dinner. The clubhouse was renovated in 2008 and now doubles as one of Brooklyn's most popular wedding venues. That's the muni double life: championship golf by day, open bar by night.
Forest Park — Queens (1901)
Tom Bendelow knew how to build public golf. The Scotsman emigrated to America in 1892 and became the Johnny Appleseed of American golf — he designed or consulted on over 600 courses, most of them public, most of them built on land nobody else wanted.
Forest Park opened as a 9-hole Bendelow design in 1901, carved into the Harbor Hill Moraine — the ridge of glacial debris left by the Wisconsin Glacier 20,000 years ago. It expanded to 18 holes by 1905 with a Dutch Colonial clubhouse called Oak Ridge, designed by the same architects behind the Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower.
Then the 20th century happened to it.
Woodhaven Boulevard was widened. The Jackie Robinson Parkway cut through. The first four holes were relocated. The course was remodeled, then remodeled again. Stephen Kay gave it a full redesign in 1995 for the park's centennial. Through all of it — expressway construction, budget crises, decades of NYC Parks neglect — Forest Park kept taking tee times.
That's the thing about these munis: they don't get to close for renovation. They absorb the damage and keep going.
Marine Park — Brooklyn (1964)
Robert Trent Jones Sr. didn't build many municipal courses. When he did, he built them like he meant it.
Marine Park sits at the southern tip of Brooklyn on Jamaica Bay — a true links-style layout on reclaimed tidal flats. It stretches past 7,000 yards from the tips, which puts it in the conversation with championship courses. But the real defense isn't length. It's wind.
The breeze comes off the bay with opinions. Club selection shifts by two or three clubs depending on the direction. The fairways are wide enough to accommodate the wind but the greens demand precision. RTJ Sr. understood something about public golf that a lot of architects miss: accessibility and challenge aren't opposites. You can build a course that welcomes beginners and tests scratch players. Marine Park does both.
Silver Lake — Staten Island (1929)
Take the Staten Island Ferry. Bring your clubs. The pro shop is a trailer. The geese outnumber the grounds crew. Silver Lake is the muni that refuses to be anything but itself.
Built in 1929 on a site that was once a reservoir for the neighboring Silver Lake Park, this 18-hole course climbs and falls with the glacial topography that defines Staten Island's north shore. It's short by modern standards — 6,200 yards from the tips — but the elevation changes and tight corridors keep things interesting.
Silver Lake doesn't have the pedigree of the other three. It wasn't designed by a Golden Age architect. It hasn't been renovated by a name firm. But it's been serving Staten Island golfers for nearly a century, and that counts for something.
The Thread
These four courses have nothing in common except the thing that matters most: they're still here.
Dyker Beach has been taking tee times since Grover Cleveland was president. Forest Park survived an expressway being built through it. Marine Park proves that RTJ Sr. could build for the working man. Silver Lake just keeps going, geese and all.
The New York golf conversation doesn't usually include them. That's fine. They weren't built for the conversation. They were built for the city.