Eisenhower Park: Red Course

Eisenhower Park Red is the oldest and most storied of the three courses at Nassau County's Eisenhower Park (East Meadow), a 1914 Devereux Emmet design that predates most of the Golden Age classics. Emmet, a skilled amateur who made the quarter-finals of the 1904 British Amateur and was married to one of A.T. Stewart's nieces, laid out the Red as part of what was originally the exclusive Salisbury Golf Club, a five-course private complex begun by wealthy Long Islanders on the Hempstead Plains. The Red's most significant moment came in 1926, when the Salisbury Links hosted the PGA Championship won by Walter Hagen for an $11,100 purse, one of the earliest major championships played on Long Island muni soil after the property transitioned to public hands. At 7,107 yards par 72 from the championship tees (72.0 rating, 123 slope), it plays long by muni standards, and decades of lengthening and green-size loss have softened some of Emmet's original features, but the strategic bones of his bunker complexes remain. For a Long Island visitor comparing Bethpage's five-course campus to the Nassau muni system, Eisenhower Red is the pedigreed counterpoint, Emmet instead of Tillinghast, with the same Golden Age DNA.