Once again, the good folks over at Golf Course Trades have done a spectacular job making my monthly column look terrific. Of course, having such a remarkable subject as Bayonne helps. It’s one of the great stories in the history of golf course construction, a Herculean endeavor in every way. From the article:
“Bayonne, just across the river from TriBeCa, was a reclamation site that required major mitigation over every square inch of its 135 acres and 7,000,000 cubic yards of trucked-in sand before it became a faithful reproduction of a UK/Irish links. Owner and developer Eric Bergstol had to navigate through a maze of permits, a forest of regulations, a phalanx of agencies, and do it all on a small, irregularly shaped parcel that had congested ingress and egress points.
“Building it was complicated,” Bergstol explained in his typically graceful, understated way. “It was industrial area….it survived every environmental scrutiny imaginable and regulatory agencies that put requirements on us that most people wouldn’t dream of being able to meet.”
Happily, Eric Bergstol isn’t “most people.” His company, Empire Golf Management developed and owns over a dozen golf courses peppered along the eastern seaboard, each one better than the last, many of them public.”
Next up on this website: PGA Championship Coverage from Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte.
