Magic Kingdoms

Bayonne GC, built on 7.5 million cubic yards of fill, offers views of Manhattan (and more).

Bayonne (N.J.) GC

While the Castle Course offers unrivaled views of the Auld Grey Toon, Bayonne GC offers even more, the Great White Way. Bayonne is located on the New Jersey shoreline of New York Harbor (the south end of the Hudson River). Its panorama starts with the skyline of New York City, takes in the Statue of Liberty and Governor's Island, Brooklyn to the east and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to the south. Of course, it also takes in docks, warehouses, industrial cranes and cylindrical oil storage tanks.

But on most spots, golfers are elevated well above the harbor hubbub, 50 feet or more above sea level, and screened from it by towering hillsides.

It wasn't like this in the beginning. Eleven years ago New Yorker Eric Bergstol took a gamble on a flat, lifeless 150-acre landfill in a rundown part of town. Bergstol, a commercial real-estate developer who branched into course ownership in the late 1980s, prepared his own design for Bayonne GC. He knew that both the New York and New Jersey harbors were being dredged to accommodate supertankers, and operators needed some place to deposit all the sludge. He offered his land, right on the water's edge, for a price, something less than a dollar per cubic yard of fill. He figured they would deposit enough that he could build some elevated tees and greens. He got that and a lot more. Five years later, 7.5 million cubic yards of fill had been dumped onto the site. As the fill arrived, Bergstol periodically had it shifted around to create imitation sand hills, striving to make it look natural. During the process, Bergstol said, "I had to ask myself: 'How would nature have done this?' "

The fill was wet, soupy sludge that had to be mixed with dry concrete in order to spread and shape it. Workers spent two years shaping the material into dunes, tees, fairways and greens, then capped the muck with two feet of topsoil and nearly a foot of sand. To avoid messing with 20 acres of wetlands, Bergstol fit his 18 holes on just 128 acres, yet managed a 7,106-yard, par-71 course by stairstepping a few fairways into his manufactured hillsides. Thirteen holes skirt the harbor, with the 486-yard, par-4 16th playing down to a peninsula green poking out into the harbor.

Today the dunes are covered with tall, wispy grasses, as well as Scotch broom, yellow broom, blackberry vines and juniper bushes. The fairways are a mix of fescue and Colonial bent; the greens, generous in size with some abrupt drop-offs, are old-school Velvet bent. There are some stacked-sod bunkers, à la St. Andrews, and an enormous "Hell's Half Acre" cross bunker, à la Pine Valley, on the par-5 fourth. Most bunkers are sprawling sand pits, built as though the wind had created them.

Bayonne was intended to be a public course -- until costs began approaching $100 million. It is now an exclusive private club, its $200,000 initiation fee catering to Wall Street executives, who can reach the course from Battery Park on the club's water taxi or from a rooftop via helicopter, in a matter of minutes.

The clubhouse, a white shingle-style New Englander with an 80-foot-tall lighthouse, sits on the highest point, 92 feet above sea level. From there Bergstol can look down at his remarkable creation, a hunk of Ireland wedged into the Jersey waterfront, with the knowledge that he provides something Doonbeg, Lahinch and Ballybunion cannot: links holes that actually intersect with the water.

Bayonne's closest competition for members is Liberty National GC, nine miles north, with a new Bob Cupp-Tom Kite design that turned a similarly blighted landfill into a gently rolling, tree-lined parkland that, unlike Bayonne, allows carts. It also boasts a steeper initiation fee, a closer view of the backside of Miss Liberty and is slated to host a PGA Tour event in 2009. Both ranked in theTop 10 of Golf Digest's "America's Best New Courses of 2007." Bayonne finished fifth, Liberty National seventh in the private category.

Other Notable Super 'Shapes'

Chambers Bay
University Place, Wash.
Future sight of a U.S. Amateur and a U.S. Open.
See Laudable Audible for photos

Kingsbarns GL
Fife, Scotland
Farmland shaped into a grand amphitheater. With both front-row fairways as well as some atop a 75-foot balcony, over half the holes appear to hang just above the crashing surf of the North Sea. Rumpled fairways and gnarly dunes complete the illusion.
No. 5 at Kingsbarn GL

Arcadia Bluffs GC
Arcadia, Mich.
While Dye was doing Whistling Straits, across the lake, Rick Smith -- better known for his instruction -- and then-associate Warren Henderson came up with a similar motif on the equally dramatic Arcadia Bluffs.
No. 14 at Arcadia Bluff GC