Baiting Hollow Club

Built in 1963 by 150 local shareholders on 100 acres of Long Island's north shore bluffs above the Long Island Sound, this Robert Trent Jones Sr. design rewards accurate play with elevated tees and greens that frame striking water vistas.

The founding of Baiting Hollow Club in 1963 is a story of genuine community investment. One hundred and fifty residents of the North Fork of Long Island each contributed $5,000 — a total of $750,000 — to purchase approximately 100 acres of cleared and wooded farmland in the hamlet of Baiting Hollow and commission the design of a new golf course. That act of collective ownership shaped the club's character from its earliest days: Baiting Hollow was built by the community, for the community, on land that the members themselves had pooled their resources to buy. The group engaged Robert Trent Jones Sr. to design the course, and construction was supervised by Charles Martin. Jones was at the peak of his career during the early 1960s, working simultaneously on major projects across the country, and his Long Island commission at Baiting Hollow represented an opportunity to design on terrain markedly different from the parkland rolls of the mid-Atlantic interior. The North Fork property offered agricultural clearings, wooded corridors, and the characteristic sandy glacial soils of eastern Long Island that support turf conditions similar in some respects to the links ground Jones admired in the British Isles.

The course opened for play in the mid-1960s and drew favorable attention from the metropolitan area golf community. Baiting Hollow Club's early decades proceeded along conventional lines for a member-owned private facility: the membership played, the course was maintained, and the community of members built the social traditions associated with Long Island private club life. That pattern was interrupted in 1983 when the club, in its entirety, was sold to the Baiting Hollow Development Corporation. The new owners developed 126 condominium units in six buildings overlooking Long Island Sound, remodeled the clubhouse and swimming pool, and renamed the property Fox Hill Golf and Country Club. The course retained its Jones routing through this period, though the character of the operation shifted from member-owned private club to a semi-private facility integrated with a residential development. In November 1996 the course was sold again, and within a short period thereafter it was reconstituted as a private club.

The process of returning the property to its original mission — a private golf club serving a committed membership — involved significant investment in course quality and physical plant. That investment accelerated when, in 2007, the club retained Hurdzan-Fry Golf Course Design to consult on restoring the course to something closer to Jones's original intentions. The accumulation of changes made during the development ownership years had moved the course away from its founding design, and the Hurdzan-Fry engagement provided both a diagnosis and a restoration framework. The physical results of that restoration process became apparent in 2009, when a new 25,000-square-foot clubhouse opened to considerable member enthusiasm. The new facility replaced the older clubhouse that had served the property since the development era and gave the club an anchor building commensurate with its ambitions as a private golf facility. The combination of a restored Jones course and a substantially upgraded clubhouse repositioned Baiting Hollow among the private clubs of Suffolk County's North Fork. Today Baiting Hollow Club operates as an 18-hole private facility on a property whose primary amenity — the Jones course — is once again the focus of the club's offerings. The combination of Jones's original routing, the Hurdzan-Fry restoration guidance, and the rolling North Fork terrain produces a course of genuine variety and challenge. The founding story of 150 neighbors pooling their resources to build something lasting continues to inform the club's identity, even as the membership has evolved through the decades since 1963.