Town Rankings / New York
The Best Golf Courses in Garden City
Garden City Golf Club was doing template holes before template holes had a marketing department. Devereux Emmet laid it out in 1899, Walter Travis, the club's great champion, tinkered and sharpened it, and the result is a men's club on Long Island where the golf feels older than the country around it and better preserved. Redans and punchbowls and a garden hole sunk in an old quarry pit, all of it a short train ride from Manhattan and a century away in spirit.
Garden City the village holds three clubs, which is an absurd concentration for a suburb, and the ranking has to separate a genuine architectural landmark from two very good members' clubs. We score the golf first, then the day, then access. Access here is private across the board, so once again the golf decides it, and that suits the landmark fine.
1Garden City Golf Club
Emmet and Travis, 1899, template holes before templates were famous. That hook is the argument in miniature. Garden City is one of the founding documents of American golf architecture: a course built on the ideas that Macdonald and Raynor would make famous, except Emmet was working them out here at the same time, on flat Long Island ground that he turned interesting with bunkers, mounds and greens that fall away where you least want them to.
The famous quarry hole, the par 3 played into an old excavation, is the postcard, but the deeper pleasure is strategic: short par 4s that dare you, greens that reward the approach from the correct side and quietly ruin the one from the wrong side. Travis won the U.S. Amateur and even a British Amateur out of this milieu, and the course still plays like a champion's puzzle rather than a bomber's runway.
The concessions are part of the record. It is a men's club, famously, stubbornly, and it is flat; nobody will mistake the ground for dunes or mountains. The golf does not need scenery. Garden City at its best is a chess match at walking pace, and chess does not need a view. First place, and the easiest call on this page.
2Cherry Valley Club
Cherry Valley is the village's other old line club, a classic parkland members' course that lives in the long shadow of its neighbour and handles the situation with grace. The golf is traditional in the proper sense: tree lined fairways, smallish greens, a premium on positioning the ball below the hole, and a membership that plays a lot of golf and takes the daily fourball as seriously as any club championship.
On pure architecture, Cherry Valley cannot match the template pedigree across town, and that is the whole of its deficit. As a place to be a member, many would argue it is the warmer, broader club, and we concede the point gladly. Garden City village can support two visions of a golf club, and Cherry Valley is the one built for a golfer with a family and a handicap that fluctuates. Second place on golf. First place for plenty of its members, and they are not wrong about their own lives.
3Garden City Country Club
Garden City Country Club completes the trio, the village's third option and the one that exists because Garden City people apparently decided two clubs was not enough golf for one suburb. It is a perfectly respectable members' course, parkland, pleasant, well kept, and it ranks third for the simplest reason in ranking: somebody in a three course town has to, and the other two have either a landmark's pedigree or a deeper old line membership culture.
The concession: on a given Saturday, the difference between third here and first in most American suburbs is enormous. Garden City Country Club would headline towns with ten times the golf budget. It is a victim of its own zip code. If your invitation says the Country Club rather than the Golf Club, go, play, enjoy it, and do not spend dinner explaining the distinction unless someone asks. Someone will ask. It is Garden City.
Three clubs, one village, and a train station. The last members walk off Garden City Golf Club in the evening the way members have since 1899, arguing about Travis, and the argument has outlived every one of them so far.