Liberty National and Maximalism: The Tipping Point?

[Eric Smith]

Bear with me, these quotes as a whole are not the easiest of reads, but I believe it will show that at least in two men's opinions it certainly can and has been done before.

I CAN compare The Rawls Course with Pacific Dunes, which is more like what Neal was asking here originally, since The Rawls started from a blank site like Liberty National.  At The Rawls and Pacific Dunes we had a lot of the same crew -- except we had additional talent in Texas -- plus the same lead associate and the same designer.  And I don't think you would find ANYONE who thought The Rawls was the better course.  That just goes to show how much more difficult it is to take a blank site and turn it into something world class.

From an older Kingsbarns thread...

It's definitly top-10 in Scotland and arguably the best course in the St. Andrews area.  Probably also top-10 of all courses built in the last 10 years.  Certainly as good as Pacific Dunes.

Rich:

I'll agree with you to the extent that I believe Kingsbarns might be a better job of golf course architecture than Pacific Dunes, for what each started with.

This pic made me go look for that, having remembered Tom writing that.

1st fairway before shaping taken by Dr. Paul Miller who helped on the project.

[Voytek Wilczak]

Voytek,
You can read about Bayonne and its flat-as-a-tabletop site here:
http://www.mgagolf.org/intraclub/query/catquery.html?doc_number=4982


Jeff,
The future that includes environmentally scarred sites is making some serious monies for its investors.

Jim:

It must have been a pretty flat landfill - only 10 feet high. But the Bayonne GC site was definitely a Bayonne landfill, while the LN site was a chemical brownfield. FWIW. The first has to deal with methane, while the other deals with heavy metals. The former goes up, while the latter goes down. Choose your poison - literally.

[Jim_Kennedy]

Voytek,
I'm not so sure that it was only a landfill:

Among other waterfront developments in Bayonne Waterfront, Empire Golf USA of New City, N.Y., started construction on a 19-hole, 700-yd. championship golf course seven years ago. The challenging project involved capping and remediating an old city landfill. Bayonne's Doria said the land had been a Standard Oil facility, but John Rockefeller used it to dump the excavated materials from Rockefeller Center in Manhattan during the 1930s.

"It took a lot of work to remediate that land," Doria said.

That brownfields site on a separate peninsula just south of the military base, required Empire to import $7.4 million worth of materials via barge and truck to raise the elevation from 10 ft. to almost 100 ft. above sea level.

(New York Construction Magazine, October 2005)

[Tom_Doak]

Eric Smith:

I have said several times that I have great admiration for what was achieved at Kingsbarns, but it does NOT belong in this discussion.  You cannot call the course a "blank site" when it had 75 feet of elevation change and a mile of oceanfront coastline.  Nobody would be nominating Kingsbarns as one of the ten best courses in Scotland if we were talking about a bunch of holes like its 10th and 11th -- the only holes which don't capitalize on a water view.

[Adam Russell]

Bear with me, these quotes as a whole are not the easiest of reads, but I believe it will show that at least in two men's opinions it certainly can and has been done before.

1st fairway before shaping taken by Dr. Paul Miller who helped on the project.

Eric, I think Kingsbarns and those former farmland courses are in a different class because of the perception people have with the image above. It's the public who looks at this photo and think "idyllic" and sees the site being used in a good way, however wrong that may be. And so courses built from former farmland seem to fall in a different category of design for me. But the world-class club on a wasteland site has not happened yet, and I think the public would put more stock into that type of achievement on a degraded and hazardous site than a similar idea built from farmland.

[archie_struthers]

 


I think it's harder to build up and shape than cut and shape like we did at Twisted Dune .....as nature cuts much faster than it accretes.

 All you had to do is see the damage recent storms did to the beaches to see how much faster

Shadow Creek is pretty cool, even though most of us here appreciate minimalism, you've got to admire Wynn's imagination about bringing the forest to the desert.
 

[Voytek Wilczak]

Voytek,
I'm not so sure that it was only a landfill:

Among other waterfront developments in Bayonne Waterfront, Empire Golf USA of New City, N.Y., started construction on a 19-hole, 700-yd. championship golf course seven years ago. The challenging project involved capping and remediating an old city landfill. Bayonne's Doria said the land had been a Standard Oil facility, but John Rockefeller used it to dump the excavated materials from Rockefeller Center in Manhattan during the 1930s.

"It took a lot of work to remediate that land," Doria said.

That brownfields site on a separate peninsula just south of the military base, required Empire to import $7.4 million worth of materials via barge and truck to raise the elevation from 10 ft. to almost 100 ft. above sea level.

(New York Construction Magazine, October 2005)

Voytek,
I'm not so sure that it was only a landfill:

Among other waterfront developments in Bayonne Waterfront, Empire Golf USA of New City, N.Y., started construction on a 19-hole, 700-yd. championship golf course seven years ago. The challenging project involved capping and remediating an old city landfill. Bayonne's Doria said the land had been a Standard Oil facility, but John Rockefeller used it to dump the excavated materials from Rockefeller Center in Manhattan during the 1930s.

"It took a lot of work to remediate that land," Doria said.

That brownfields site on a separate peninsula just south of the military base, required Empire to import $7.4 million worth of materials via barge and truck to raise the elevation from 10 ft. to almost 100 ft. above sea level.

(New York Construction Magazine, October 2005)

I guess we'll have to ask Doria unless he's in jail due to the recent FBI sting operation in the Hudson County.

LOL.

But on a serious note, the above is likely the quote that I remembered about the municipal landfill in Bayonne. If Mr Doria meant Standard Oil facility and Empire State Building excavation fill, not a municipal garbage dump, so be it. My guess is that Mr Doria don't know a landfill from his own house.

Standard Oil was also a LN site, so they did start on an equal footing (no pun intended).

[Eric Smith]

Thanks for clearing that up Tom.  Elevation makes all the difference.

Back to the bleachers!

[Bill_McBride]

I think people would accept a course on a landfill that is world-class, regardless of the "fakeness". Its just the fact that we haven't seen a world-class effort come out of a degraded site because most of the landfill courses either do way too much (Whistling Straits) or way too little (the majority of brownfield designs). In fact, I think this might be the next challenge for golf course architects to stand out and push the discipline to a point where more acknowledge it and see it on a level of say, an architect. So the question remains: can an architect take a landfill and turn it into a world-class course? It hasn't happened yet.

I have not been there personally and would welcome any opinions, but didn't Forrest Richardson turn a landfill in Monticello, Utah into a very well thought of course called The Hideout?

[Jed Rammell]

Maximalism is still winning if Black Rock is in anybody's Top 100 list. 

[Adam Russell]

I think people would accept a course on a landfill that is world-class, regardless of the "fakeness". Its just the fact that we haven't seen a world-class effort come out of a degraded site because most of the landfill courses either do way too much (Whistling Straits) or way too little (the majority of brownfield designs). In fact, I think this might be the next challenge for golf course architects to stand out and push the discipline to a point where more acknowledge it and see it on a level of say, an architect. So the question remains: can an architect take a landfill and turn it into a world-class course? It hasn't happened yet.

I have not been there personally and would welcome any opinions, but didn't Forrest Richardson turn a landfill in Monticello, Utah into a very well thought of course called The Hideout?

Bill, I haven't seen many pictures of The Hideout, but I was thinking along the lines of world-class as in a top 1%, Pine Valley type of layout. This thought also made me consider - could someone try a Pine Valley type of theme on a landfill or hazardous site? If you could plant the trees in the sand cap and you were already in for a considerable amount of money, why not try it? I know most of the waste sites with great views are near water, and hence the faux dunes, but it would be good to see someone with a high-profile redevelopment go in a different direction.

[Jim_Kennedy]

Voytek,

I don't think he was saying that it wasn't a landfill, just that it had a prior life as an oil terminal and as a landfill for Rockefeller when he was building RC.

That was probably why it was such a complicated remediation.  

[Kalen Braley]

Thanks for clearing that up Tom.  Elevation makes all the difference.

Back to the bleachers!

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