OLDEST PUBLIC COURSE IN USA - DESIGNED BY AN ABERDONIAN

FROM THE GOLF DIGEST.COM WEBSITE
By David Owen
On Sunday, twelve of us played Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx, one of a dozen courses owned by the city of New York. It opened the summer of 1895, six years after my home club, and is the oldest public course in the United States.
(It was designed by Aberdonian Tom Bendlow, pictured, a printer to trade with a forerunner of the Aberdeen Press and Journal but who found a new career after emigrating to the United States as the golf boom hit North America).
It also has what may be the world’s coolest locker room, which still contains the original wooden lockers. The Three Stooges, film star comedians of yesteryear, considered Van Cortlandt their home course. Other visitors have included baseball's Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, boxer Joe Louis, and my friends and me.
The original Van Cortlandt golf course was built for $642.80. It had just nine holes, of which the last was more than 700 yards long. For a few years in 1960s, the city operated three ski slopes on the four short, hilly, quirky closing holes, at the southern end of the park.
(You get to those holes by crossing under the Major Deegan Expressway, on a concrete walkway with tall fences on either side.)
But now the golf course is just a golf course again, even during the so-called winter.
Van Cortlandt was originally known as the Meadows, and it was very popular, even though in 1895 hardly anybody in America owned golf clubs or knew anything about how to hit a golf ball.
In 1899, Tom Bendelow—a 30-year-old emigrant from Aberdeen and former typesetter, who eventually designed 650 courses in North America—expanded Van Cortlandt to 18 holes. By 1920, according to the Parks Department, it was handling 5,000 players a week.
Bendelow’s design survived until the 1940s, when Robert Moses began building highways on top of it. Today, the course is divided into four roughly equal-size lobes. They are separated by two highways (the Major Deegan and the Mosholu Parkway) and a fence-enclosed swamp called Tibbetts Brook, which resembles the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings, except murkier.
On Sunday, the first of our three tee times was 7:56 (Tom Bendelow is credited with introducing the idea of  organising starting times. Prior to thgat people just turned up and played or waited their turn until the first tee was clear).
Because we were going to Van Cortlandt, we were able to lure Ferris out of hibernation. The night before, he sent us this email:

"My childhood home was at 1 Tibbetts Road, in Yonkers, and our property line was Van Cortlandt Park. My friends and I used to cut holes in the chain-link fence near the fourth green and play the three holes on this side of the Major Deegan and Mosholu Parkway.
"We would steal the bamboo whips that the ‘parkies’ used to whip the dew off the greens, and occasionally we would also steal the flags, and we would sell golf balls. Since the approaches to some of the holes were blind, we could run out and grab balls that had just been hit and then sell them to the next groups that came by.
"We did all this while keeping an eye out for the parkies’ pickup trucks. When we saw them come rumbling over the hill, we would scoot back through the hole that we had cut in the fence, and then hide in the woods. The following day, the hole would be wired closed, so we always carried a heavy-duty wire-cutter in one of our golf bags.
"Of course, most of us had old bags, with hickory-shafted clubs. My house was about two hundred yards from the course. I’ve never paid to play at Van Cortlandt, and I’ve never played the holes on the other side of the highways."

Ferris's fence, with a modern hole, just beyond the fourth green.
For lunch, we went to the Bronx Ale House, just a few minutes away.