I really wish I had the knack of typing in coloured text. I must have spent half an hour the other night trying to do that and failed as you can see. So rather than try and interject my responses to your individual responses etc let me respond in general to many of the good points you make.
I'm also having a hard time using the colors, size, bold and other features and I can't cut and paste.
Is anyone else experiencing these difficulties ?
When I had my "rant" regarding buildings overlooking courses I was making a general point and not trying to be prescriptive in how you must treat buildings on courses etc. As you say its a clash of cultutres and I dare say many an Amercian might otherwise play the course and say great course, great views but what the hell were the thinking in keeping those old rundown houses beside the course. Alternatively they might not bat an eyelid and like Carl J have taken them in as part of the scenery and moved on. Either way, and as you say, Trump is perfectly within his rights to build a berm provided it conforms with regs etc.
I think you're right, some golfers won't notice the buildings and others will, some will regard them as an eyesore.
Ken Bakst had a similar decision to make on his 3rd hole at Friar's Head.
There was an old barn directly behind the 3rd green.
He chose to leave it there.
Some feel it added character to the hole, others felt it was an eyesore.
So, it's perspective, "beauty residing in the eye of the beholder"[/b]
Whether he is legally right however won't stop him looking petty in the court of public opinion.
Much of the Scottish and even international press regarding the building of this course has focused on his dealings with these houseowners.
His pretty flagrant lobbying for CPO powers to be used has gone down badly with most people as you might imagine in a country where great swathes of the population were evicted from their homes only several generations ago. To belatedly say that he's not looking for the CPO powers to be used and at the same time block the view of the houses and block the view from the houses can't help but seem petty and an act of bad grace. No matter, he has his permissions and in time all will have been forgotten by most.
Nobody knows the formula for success, but surely, the formula for failure is to try to please everybody.
On a project of this scale, I'm sure that there are a multitude of objectors on a wide variety of issues.
If the developer, any developer caved and catered to each and every objection, I doubt the project would reach fruition.
And, if it did, the quality would be dramatically diluted, distilled into mediocrity by compromise.
I often wonder how much better Sebonack would have been without Tom Doak having to compromise with just one person, Jack Nicklaus.
Now, maybe that's presumptuous on my part, but, I can't help thinking that Sebonack would have been a better golf course had Tom Doak "retained sole creative control". Contemplate for a second, the finished product at Sebonack, had a committee been responsible for its design.
Then expand that to every self interest group on the East End.
I know for a fact that some homeowners in the area objected to building a golf course on that site because they maintained that it might disturb historical indian tribal or burial areas. In one context, that allegation is comical. It didn't stop the objectors from building their homes on that land.
Other nearby homeowners indicated that they wouldn't object to a course being built if they were granted free memberships.
So, sometimes the local homeowner objections need to be scrutinized more carefully before you side with the "underdog" or "little guy"
against the assumed, big, bad developer, and, even worse, Darth Trump.
I don't know the specific homeowners, or the particular specifics of each case.
But, I do know that I object to someone dictating how I should treat my property, ONLY because they have a beneficial interest, a bias, when making their opinion known.
I was involved in similar situations where nearby homeowners demanded that they be granted views onto an adjacent golf course, when that golf course was neither a party nor an agent inducing them with respect to the purchase of their home.
Some threatened to file suit.
My view was, go ahead, file a suit. We're not responsible for your views and we can do what we want with our property as long as we abide by the local, county and State ordinances.
Our position was upheld.[/b]
One last point. You talk of the genesis and evolutionary progress of this course being in months. The fight for planning permission, not counting the initial period of inception, has been several years plus the building of the course which is going to be how long ? Then what ? I'll bet if you had the opportunity to look back at this course from a hundred years hence that you would see a course which had continually evolved either at the hand of man or due to natural forces. Similar to TOC in fact. Don't believe me ? How many changes has Kingbarns had, or the Dukes St Andrews, or the two St Andrews Bay courses ? And all of them are relatively new. Now you take that process over a hundred years and I suspect that you will find the course which will be opened for play in the near future will be a good bit different from the one in a hundred years.
Niall, you can't compare the genesis of two courses, in two vastly different sites, in different times, one urban, one rural, where one took centuries and the other, contemporaneous, taking months or even a few years. It's really not a valid analogy, but, I understand your point.