"Lido wasn't about dredging, dredging was just a means to an end. Lido was about creating something out of nothing. WS is a modern version of creating something out of nothing."
Tom:
Certainly creating something out of nothing is a similarity between WS and The Lido, but the similarity probably ends there. The Lido was about dredging and filling natural areas of water retention and WS was not. It appears to me that WS is rather high over Lake Michigan, but the Lido was not high over the Great South Bay of Long Island---in the beginning it was practically part of it.
Probably unfortunately, that means The Lido was a golf course, as was a part of MacD/Raynor's Creek Club, constantly exposed to problems of hydrology and we do know it wasn't long before that took it's toll on perhaps Macdonald/Raynor's most impressive Biarritz hole (#8) which apparently also affected the 9th. The same kind of inherent dredge and fill problems were also constant on five of Macdonald/Raynor holes at the Creek Club which ended up costing the club over $100,000 to fix in the 1930s. (I'd have liked to see you try to convince The Creek Club back then that this was just an "earth-moving" means to an end. Apparently Macdonald wasn't very good at convincing them of that and ended up resigning from the club over what went wrong and how to fix it! But what the hell, who really cares what a membership thinks, right, even if it does end up costing them an additional $100,000 in the 1930, perhaps the cost of a very good golf course at that time!
)
So, yes, while you think creating something out of nothing by dredge and fill operation is simply the same thing as the massive earth-moving of WS, let's hope the latter course will never have some of the inherent architectural problems of a few of Macdonald/Raynor's "create something out of nothing" dredge and fill operations. Being that high over Lake Michigan I doubt WS will have those inherent hydrology problems with its architecture, although a few of those WS greens do hang quite precariously close over cliffs down to Lake Michigan!