CDisher:
The aerial I'm looking at is from around 1930 as Flynn's Shinnecock is being built. The aerial belongs to Shinnecock and I sent the negatives back to them. I've never seen it before, not in any book anyway. No Rte #27 appears in this aerial. In it, holes #1, (2),3,7,8,9 are MacDonald/Raynor's holes unchanged. Flynn had obviously not started to work on them. At that time the course played in some kind of composite routing using Flynn's new holes and some of the old MacD/Raynor holes unchanged.
SPDB:
The vast amounts of sand on the front nine (#5, 6, 8 ) was done that way for a reason. Flynn concluded that that low-lying part of the property did not possess that much natural interest and so he used far more sand areas than on the present far more topographical back nine holes where he felt the far more interesting natural aspects in that area didn't need supplementing with as much bunkering or sand areas.
Those vast stretches of sand are quite interesting actually (in their construction), as they appear to have evolved slowly into bunkering (if they can really be called that in the earlier photos). It appears vast stretches of sand were originally just uncovered! Flynn sometimes identified areas like this on holes and called in his "construction instructons" for "undulationing"! We believe that might have been an influence from PVGC!
Today a good deal of that sandy wasty area has grown back into rough grass but the club may be interested in returning those areas to sandy wasty areas again. The effect from the tees would be far more dramatic (as it once was)!
I suppose though, that possibly like Cypress on opening a club might need to be a bit careful with such enormous sandy wasty areas as it's possible, I guess, that the sand might start to blow!
It seems to me that much of the original sandy wasty areas of Cypress have grown back into rough grass. I don't know whether such a thing would need to be maintained somehow to keep and preserve that original look or if Flynn ever even planned on them preserving it the way it appears in this early aerial. Apparently not, as the sand areas on #5, for instance, looks much more like a combination sandy wasty area/traditional bunkering in later on ground photos.
It's even occuring to Wayne and I that certain areas and types of basic bunkering areas that Flynn planned occasionally might have been a situation where he expected the bunkering to "evolve" over time instead of building it to the finished product during the actual construction phase.
In a way that's the way some of the bunkering at Merion seems to have evolved. Was that purposeful? Not sure but it's beginning to look like it might have been.
One other thing that might lead us to assume this is William Flynn was known to be extremely interested in all kinds of grasses and varieties and liked to experiment with them!