Dyker Beach Park and Golf Course
The Dyker Beach Park and Golf Course is a public park and a municipal, 18-hole, championship golf course in the southernmost part of Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, in New York City, United States. The area stretches from the Belt Parkway in the south to 86th Street in the north, between 7th Avenue on the west and 14th Avenue on the east.
The course totals 217 acres and includes 6,548 yards of golf. Both the park's and the course's roots go back more than 100 years, and it is one of the most played public golf courses in the nation.
The golf course is managed by the American Golf Corporation, which not only won the contract to run the majority of New York City courses in 1999 but also renovated and expanded the club house in 2007-2008. Dyker Beach Golf Course is one of the oldest golf courses in the United States and second oldest in New York City, behind Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx. The course is open for an eight-month golf season.
The park officially dates back to 1895, but its use as public land goes back to the times of the Canarsee Indians and the original New Utrecht Dutch settlers who referred to it as the "common land." The Indians and the Dutch were unable to farm the land or to build houses on it because it was mainly meadows, marsh, and swamps. During the 17th century, the Van Dyke family tried to drain and reclaim this marshy land by building dykes. Thus the origins of the park’s name – after the Van Dyke family who built dykes or the dykes that the Van Dykes built.
The park evolved in four stages between 1895 and 1934, from upwards of eight parcels of land. Starting in 1895, the City of Brooklyn secured the first parcel, which stretched from the shore of Gravesend Bay to about 92nd street, and hired the landscape architecture firm of Olmsted, Olmsted and Eliot to design a 50-acre (200,000 m2) park, to be "the only seaside park in Greater New York." It was to include a saltwater lagoon, children's playgrounds, bathhouses, lawns, and drives along the shore. According to the NYC Parks Department, the 1896 Annual Report of the Brooklyn Parks Department claimed that Dyker Beach Park would be the "finest seaside park in the world." Although bathhouses were erected and roads were constructed, the plans were revised in 1911 by Mr. Charles D. Lay, a former landscape architect for the Park’s Department, who proposed to decrease the size of the lagoon and to add concert groves. In 1918 work began to fill the swampy areas of the park.
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