North Hempstead Country Club

History

The year was 1916, and along the North Shore of Long Island, where old money was busy remaking the landscape into a corridor of private clubs, a group of members set out to establish North Hempstead Country Club on Port Washington Boulevard in what is now Flower Hill. The club took its place among the wave of Gold Coast institutions rising in that era, when Long Island’s gentry sought refuge from the city in pursuits that required acreage, discretion, and a good architect.

For that last requirement, the founders turned to A. W. Tillinghast, already building the reputation that would make him one of the era’s defining golf architects. Tillinghast was in the early stretch of a career that would soon carry him to Winged Foot, Baltusrol, and San Francisco Golf Club, and his work at North Hempstead reflects a designer still refining the principles he would later deploy on grander stages — an eye for using the natural contours of a site rather than imposing artificial demands upon it. The Long Island terrain gave him modest, rolling ground to work with, and he shaped a course suited to the membership’s ambitions without the vast budgets of his later commissions.

North Hempstead Country Club has remained a private club through its more than a century of existence, its Tillinghast design enduring as one of the architect’s lesser-known but authentic Long Island contributions, a marker of his formative years before the acclaim of the 1920s arrived.