# The Best Golf Courses in Locust Valley

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-locust-valley-ny/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / New York


A leading golf course in New York. Photo: Michael O'Connor, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Drive through Locust Valley and you would never know two of the most storied clubs in American golf are behind the hedges. This is the Gold Coast, the old money end of Long Island's North Shore, where Piping Rock Club keeps polo fields in the infield of its golf course, polo fields, inside the course, and The Creek ends its round with an island green floating in the marsh of Long Island Sound. Charles Blair Macdonald built this world, and Locust Valley is where he built its social headquarters.

Two courses, both private, both Macdonald lineage, both essentially invitation only in any practical sense. Access decides nothing here because there is none to discuss. So the ranking is pure golf, then the day, and it is one of the closest two course fights on this entire site.

## 1Piping Rock Club

Piping Rock is Macdonald's Gold Coast club, the place where the template holes, the Redan, the Biarritz, the Eden and the rest of his borrowed Scottish vocabulary, were laid out for the titans who summered on the North Shore. The polo fields in the infield are the famous eccentricity, and they are not a gimmick: Macdonald routed golf around polo because his members demanded both, and the wide, open interior gives the course a scale and a wind exposure that inland parkland golf never gets.

The golf is the fullest expression of Macdonald the strategist in this town. The templates here are not museum copies. They are working holes that still punish the lazy line and reward the shaped shot, and the course has the depth, hole after hole, that championship committees and architecture panelists have recognised for a century. If you can play one course in Locust Valley, this is the one, and everyone in the town's golf world knows it.

The concession: Piping Rock's very completeness can feel formal, a grand club performing grandeur, and golfers who prefer their Macdonald intimate and quirky will argue for the course down the road. We hear it. We rank the complete examination over the charming one. First place, by a head, not a length.

## 2The Creek

The Creek is the most romantic course in this argument. It starts in the woods and on the bluff like a normal Gold Coast club, then the round descends, hole by hole, toward Long Island Sound, until the famous island green sits out in the marsh with the tide and the birds and nothing else for company. The closing stretch at The Creek is a piece of theatre no other course on Long Island can stage: golf walking down a hill into the sea air.

Macdonald had a hand here too, with Seth Raynor's influence in the family tree, and the templates on the upper holes are fine work. The course's case for first is that its best holes, the descent, the beach, the island green, are more memorable than Piping Rock's best. Peaks against depth. We rank depth first, but we concede the peaks without a fight. Plenty of panels have The Creek underrated nationally, and if your one invitation is here instead of Piping Rock, you have lost nothing that matters.

The other concession is scale. The Creek is the smaller production, and in a still, humid week the marsh can bring the insects that remind you the Sound is a living place. Bring spray. Play the golf. The island green forgives neither, and you would not want it to.

Locust Valley will never advertise any of this. Hedges, gates, polo ponies, and behind them two Macdonald era courses arguing quietly for a hundred years about which of them Macdonald loved more. The argument is the point. Nobody here wants it settled.

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