Town Rankings / New York

The Best Golf Courses in Rye

Rye is forty minutes from Manhattan by train and about a century away in temperament. The streets run down to Long Island Sound, the hedges are tall, and the golf, for a town this size, is absurdly deep: a club that hosted a U.S. Amateur before the First World War, a Tillinghast championship course that held a PGA Tour event for decades, and a city owned course with a castle for a clubhouse. Westchester money built all three. They could hardly be more different to play.

The ranking below scores the golf first. That matters here, because Rye is exactly the kind of town where social rank and golf rank get confused, and they are not the same list.

1Westchester Country Club

The West Course is the strongest golf course in Rye and it is not particularly close. Walter Travis routed it and A.W. Tillinghast rebuilt it into a championship test, all rolling Westchester terrain, bold bunkering and greens that punish the lazy side of every hole. The PGA Tour stopped here for decades under various sponsor names, which tells you two things: the course could hold professional fields, and it photographed beautifully doing it. The club also has the South Course for the everyday game, but the West is the argument.

The concession: it is a big, formal, hotel attached country club, and some golfers find the scale of the place works against the intimacy they want from a round. Fair. But a ranking that puts charm ahead of this routing, this terrain and this tournament record would be lying to you. Westchester West is a top tier New York golf course that happens to sit in a town with two other stories to tell.

2The Apawamis Club

Apawamis hosted the 1911 U.S. Amateur and sits close enough to the Rye train station that members have been walking in from the city for more than a hundred years. The golf is old fashioned in the ways that phrase should mean as praise: blind shots kept rather than bulldozed, short par 4s with teeth, greens with tilt you feel in your ankles. It is exclusive in the quiet way, the kind of club that does not need your application or your opinion of it.

Its devotees will tell you it should be first, that Westchester is a resort with a hard course attached and Apawamis is the real club. There is a case. It loses on the championship evidence and on the sheer variety of the West Course's holes, and it wins on character by about the same margin. Second place, no apology attached. If you get one round in Rye and it is here, you have not been shortchanged.

3Rye Golf Club

Then there is the municipal, and what a municipal. Rye Golf Club is city owned, open to residents and, at a price, to the rest of us, and its clubhouse is Whitby Castle, a stone mansion above the Sound that looks like it wandered in from a different sport entirely. The course itself is an old Devereux Emmet layout, short by modern numbers, tight, hilly, with water views doing a lot of the atmospheric work.

Honesty requires the concession up front: the golf cannot stand next to the two privates above it on architecture, conditioning budget or length. It finishes third on golf and first on the only ranking most golfers can actually use, the one you can book. In a county where public access is scarce and expensive, a playable Emmet by the Sound with a castle on the hill is not a footnote. It is the reason this list belongs to Rye and not just to Rye's members.

One more thing about the geography, because it shapes every round here. None of these courses gives you much room to be sloppy. Westchester rolls, Apawamis tilts, the muni squeezes, and the Sound wind gets a vote on all three. Rye golf is golf in a small, expensive frame, and the frame makes the courses play bigger than their scorecards.

Play the muni on a weekday evening, when the Sound goes flat and silver and the castle lights come on, and the gap between first and third feels smaller than this page says it is.