Stephen Kay came back to New York City in 1983 with no money in his pocket and a tentative job renovating golf courses that would end up paying him around $4,000 for the next 12 months. He was offered a job to build a golf course from scratch in Florida — what was essentially his dream — but when the owners of the property told him they wanted a “moonscape” look to the course, the traditionalist Kay turned them down and headed back to where he first fell in love with the game.
“My first round of golf was at Clearview GC [in Queens] in the spring of ninth grade,” says Kay, now a world-renowned golf course architect — then, in the early-1960’s, just a kid from Whitestone, Queens. “I remembering looking up at the eighth hole, you see the Throgs Neck [Bridge] and the [Long Island] Sound. It was a real feeling of tranquility and peace, and honestly, a feeling of being closer to God. I fell in love with the whole experience of it.”
Kay was in a succession of New Yorkers who had that experience, and they were lucky enough to have it sooner than just about anywhere else in America.
PHOTOS: GOLF COURSES AROUND NYC
The first stage of New York City golf started when Van Cortlandt Park in The Bronx opened as a free nine-hole course in 1896, the first public course in America. Then in the roaring ’20’s, there were many courses built in Queens, some by America’s great architects including Alister MacKenzie, A.W. Tillinghast and Seth Raynor (all of those by “The Golden Age” architects wiped out by either The Depression or World War II). Then in the ’30’s, architect John Van Kleek worked tirelessly for the Works Progress Administration, building new or restoring old courses all over the four outer-boroughs.
After WWII, there wasn’t much room for new designs within city limits, the last full-length course coming in 1963 when Robert Trent Jones built Marine Park GC on an inlet in southeastern Brooklyn. (That might change if the Jack Nicklaus-designed course for Ferry Point in The Bronx, at the mouth of the Whitestone Bridge, ever gets fully built.)
The next major advances came when the city decided to auction off the concessions to run each golf course starting in 1983. It was the same year that Kay came back to New York after working for more than 10 years in Michigan under respected architect William Newcomb.
In leaving Newcomb, Kay became his own boss and worked on spec for these different companies or individuals that won the bidding to operate the city courses. Doing so is how Kay got his architectural hand on six of the 13 full-length city public courses, as well as the pitch-and-putt course in Flushing Meadows.
“I’ve been working with Doug [Smith] as a design partner for many years and we share a lot of projects,” Kay said. “When it came to the New York City courses, I said, ‘Doug, those are mine.’ ”
Kay is not alone in his passion for city golf, as exemplified by the 100,000’s rounds played on city courses every year.
“The golf courses have really evolved, just like the city,” Kay said. “Although most golf courses around the country are hurting, New York City golf is going to be just fine — always has been.”