Metropolis Country Club

In a neighborhood of fabulous Golden Age designs, Metropolis Country Club might be overlooked—but its Herbert Strong design, remodeled in the late 1920s by A.W. Tillinghast and recently restored by Ron Forse—holds its own among Westchester County’s strongest hidden gems. Despite mostly tight playing corridors that dogleg left or right through trees, Metropolis features very large, interesting green complexes with multiple levels, humps, hollows, bowls, backboards and sideboards and a unique 25-yard shortcut of grass before each green that is slightly longer than green height. This allows the player to approach almost every green either low or high, using the ground to get the ball close to the hole. Fairways slope with a number of undulations on many holes, making them deceptively difficult to hold. Our panelists note that a driving range with tall netting squeezed between the 17th and 18th holes—which creates internal out of bounds on the penultimate hole—creates a bit of an eyesore at the end of the beautiful routing, but thus is the nature of jamming in a range for members on a piece of land that was never planned for practice.