Course Profiles / New York
The Creek: A Course Profile
The 11th hole gives the game away. An island Biarritz green, sitting out in the water at Locust Valley, on a course designed by Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor and opened in 1925. A Biarritz is strange enough on dry land, a huge green split by a swale that turns one long putt into two separate problems. Put it on an island above Long Island Sound and it stops being a template hole and becomes a statement. We built this on a bluff, the hole says. We know exactly what we have.
The Creek was dubbed the Million Dollar Club on opening, for its exclusive membership, and a century later the exclusivity is still the first fact about the place. It is private, fully and unapologetically, in Locust Valley in Nassau County. Golfweek ranked it No. 53 on its 2026 list of the best classic courses in the United States, which for a club that does almost nothing to promote itself is a telling number. The Creek does not campaign. It sits on its bluff and lets the architecture argue.
Macdonald and Raynor were building template golf at its most confident in 1925. Redans, Biarritzes, Shorts and Punchbowls, holes borrowed from the old British links and rebuilt with American scale and American money. Plenty of their courses have been softened, lengthened, or modernized into something else. The Creek kept its character in part because money and privacy protect a place from fiddling. Gil Hanse restored the course in 2011, and Hanse is the right hand for that job, a restorer who strengthens what is there instead of stamping his own name across it. The work sharpened the Macdonald and Raynor bones rather than replacing them.
A bluff, a sound, and a split personality
The setting does half the talking. The course sits on a bluff above Long Island Sound, and the golf changes character as it moves between the higher ground and the holes that drop toward the shore. Upland holes play through the kind of north shore estate country that defined Gold Coast Long Island. Then the routing gives you water, wind off the Sound, and that island green at the 11th. Template architecture can feel academic on a flat inland site, like a museum of holes. Here the land keeps interrupting the lesson. A Redan into a Sound breeze is not an exhibit. It is a shot you have to commit to.
That is also the honest answer to the usual knock on Macdonald and Raynor courses, that the templates repeat. On a single round, maybe, if you play all their courses in a season, you start recognizing the furniture. At The Creek the furniture keeps getting moved into different light. Compare it with the other names in our Locust Valley town ranking and the difference is plain. Most classic courses give you one mood. This one gives you two, estate golf and shore golf, stitched together by designers who understood drama.
Who suits it? A golfer who likes ground game options, bold green contours, and holes that reward a shaped shot over a flown one. The Biarritz swale alone will teach you more about pace and line in one putt than a season of flat resort greens. Who gets frustrated? The player who wants every hole to explain itself from the tee. Macdonald loved a blind or half blind moment, a green that hides its logic until you are standing over the ball. If that feels unfair rather than interesting, The Creek will feel like a test written in a language you do not speak.
The concession is access, and it is not a small one. Estimates put initiation at clubs of this tier well into six figures, and that figure is an estimate, because The Creek publishes nothing and membership runs through people who already belong. For nearly every golfer reading this, The Creek is a course to study rather than a tee time to book. We rank it in the best courses in New York on architecture, not availability, and the state list is honest about that split at the top.
A hundred years after the Million Dollar Club opened its doors, the money is no longer the interesting part. The island Biarritz is. It still sits out there in the Sound wind, splitting putts and arguments alike.