# Bally's Golf Links at Ferry Point: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/ballys-golf-links-at-ferry-point-profile/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / New York


A golf ball beside the hole on a green. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Whitestone Bridge does the opening work here. It towers over the west side of the course, traffic moving high above ground that used to be a capped industrial landfill, and below it sits one of the newest municipal courses in New York City. That sentence should not work. Landfill, bridge, city golf. At Ferry Point it does, and Golfweek noticed: No. 4 on its 2026 list of the best courses you can play in New York, in a state where the public bench includes some very famous names. Our own ordering puts it in context in [the best courses in New York ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-new-york/), and the surprise is not that a Bronx municipal made the list. The surprise is how high it climbed.

Start with the land, because the land is the argument. This is a built golf course in the fullest sense, shaped out of a former industrial site in the Bronx, co-designed by Jack Nicklaus and John Sanford. Nothing about the ground was given. Every contour had to be made, every view framed on purpose, and the designers leaned into the one asset no shaping budget can buy: the setting. The bridge on the west side, the open sky, the sense of playing links-style golf inside the five boroughs. Links is a word that gets abused, usually by courses with a fescue border and a marketing department. Here the word at least points at something real, an exposed, wind-open site where the ground game and the low ball matter more than they do on a tree-lined parkland course across town.

## What the golf asks

Nicklaus, across his career, built courses that ask a clear question off the tee: commit to a line, carry what needs carrying, and your reward is an angle. Sanford's hand in the co-design keeps that championship skeleton playable for the municipal golfer who is actually paying the fee and playing it on a Saturday. That balance is the whole trick of Ferry Point. A course ranked this high by Golfweek cannot be a pushover, and a city course that only scratch players enjoy would be a civic failure. Ferry Point threads it. The better player gets a test shaped by wind and position. The 18-handicapper gets room to miss in the places where a miss should be survivable, and trouble in the places where he got greedy.

Who does it frustrate? The golfer who wants trees to tell him where to aim. There is no corridor golf here, no hole that plays the same in August calm as it does when the wind comes off the water and the bridge is humming above you. Shot selection changes by the hour. Players who like a course to be the same test every time will find that annoying. Players who like to flight a ball down and run it onto a green will think they have found the best public round in the city.

## The access reality, stated plainly

Municipal. That word matters more than the ranking. The great New York courses most lists celebrate are private, and the public golfer reads about them the way he reads about yachts. Ferry Point is city golf, open to the public golfer who books a tee time, and it carries a top-five state public ranking while doing it. One honest concession belongs here: a high-profile municipal with a famous design team and a national ranking is not going to play like a quiet neighborhood nine. Demand is real, the setting is an event, and the round asks more of your wallet and your patience than the average city track. Golfweek's ranking reflects the golf, not the ease of the day around it.

Set that against what you get. A Nicklaus and Sanford design, on reshaped landfill, under a bridge, in the Bronx, ranked fourth among every course a visitor can play in New York. Ten years ago that sentence reads as a joke about municipal golf. Now it is a tee time people plan around. The landfill detail, told straight, is not an embarrassment to hide in the footnotes. It is the best story in New York public golf: the city took its least promising ground and built one of its best courses on top of it.

Ferry Point will not out-argue Bethpage Black for the soul of New York public golf, and it does not need to. It needs to be exactly what it is, a modern, wind-open, honestly difficult municipal that a public golfer can actually play. Stand on the west side with the Whitestone Bridge overhead and the skyline doing its work in the distance, and the ranking stops looking generous. It looks overdue.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.