Niall,
Patrick is mistaken about the purpose of the 10,000 truckloads of dirt. It wasn't for construction purposes, it was topsoil so they could grow grass. CBM is explicit about this. As for construction vs. lay of the land, CBM writes of finding a number of holes before the land was even secured, including the Alps, Redan, Eden, Cape, and Punchbowl.
Have you been to NGLA? Surely there was some construction (especially on certain green sites) but the layout also incorporates a number of incredible "lay of the land" features and it is quite apparent that the routing was tailored to take advantage of these many features.
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Jeff,
There was never a "residential" component on this parcel. In in a 1904 letter, CBM had offered a hypothetical about how his proposed club might work, and he mentioned the possibility of divvying up extra land for member's residences. That language got repeated a few times in early newspaper reports about the formation of NGLA, but when it came to securing this site CBM tailored the boundaries around the golf course and there was little room left over for anything else (except for the yacht basin.) If you look at the early plans and consider the property border, you'll see that there was no room for residential.
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Mike,
I don't think that the advantage of being near Shinnecock Inn necessitated that the course start and end in the exact spot of the current 10th green/9th tee, especially because they originally contemplated a locker/shower house at the start/finish of the course. Surely they wanted to start finish somewhere convenient to the Inn, but there is a lot of potential flexibility in that desire. As Jeff points out, starting even a bit closer to the bluff (or finishing a bit further from it) would change the calculation.