Bethpage Black Course
Designed by A. W. Tillinghast
History
The story of Bethpage Black begins not with a wealthy sponsor or a private membership, but with the working relief programs of the Great Depression. In the 1930s, New York State acquired the old Lenox Hills estate in Farmingdale, part of a broader push to expand public recreation for New Yorkers who had no access to private clubs. The Black Course opened in 1936, built with labor from the Works Progress Administration, an emblem of the era’s belief that a great golf course need not be gated to be great.
A. W. Tillinghast, already established as one of the era’s foremost architects through his work at Winged Foot and Baltusrol, took on Bethpage’s Black Course as part of a five-course complex on the property. Given a rugged, rolling piece of Long Island terrain, Tillinghast built a course of unapologetic scale and difficulty, one that matched his private-club designs in ambition despite its public mandate. It was, from the start, a statement that municipal golf could be built to championship standards rather than scaled down for casual play.
For decades the Black Course was known mostly to regulars and to golfers willing to sleep in their cars for a weekend tee time, until a renovation led by Rees Jones in the late 1990s restored and reinforced Tillinghast’s original design in preparation for national competition. That work paid off in 2002, when Bethpage Black hosted the U.S. Open, becoming the first true public course to stage the championship. It returned in 2009 for another U.S. Open, then again in 2019 to host the PGA Championship, cementing its place among the handful of courses trusted with the game’s biggest stages while remaining, as it always has, open to any golfer willing to make the walk.
Playing Notes
Bring your full arsenal off the tee, because the rough here isn't a mild inconvenience — it's thick, gnarly, and sits right up against fairways that feel narrower than they measure. The bunkers are the real story: steep-walled, deep, and positioned exactly where a slightly missed shot wants to land, turning what should be a routine recovery into a genuine test of nerve. Elevation changes on the front nine will mess with your club selection more than the yardage book suggests, and the greens run fast and firm, so anything landing above the hole leaves a slick, testy putt coming back down. This is a walking course by tradition, and the terrain will remind you of that by the back nine — pack comfortable shoes and pace yourself on club selection, because fatigue plus these fairways is a bad combination. Leave the driver in the bag on a few holes where position matters more than yardage; the golfer who scores well here is the one who accepts bogey as an acceptable outcome rather than forcing a hero shot out of the rough.