Van Cortlandt Park: America's First Public Golf Course

Van Cortlandt Park in the northwest Bronx is one of New York City's oldest and largest parks, nearly twelve hundred acres of forest, meadow, and wetland that began as a Dutch colonial plantation and became, in eighteen ninety-five, the site of a small democratic revolution in American sport.

Before European settlement, the Wecquaesgeek people of the Lenape nation fished and farmed along Tibbetts Brook, which they called Mosholu, meaning smooth stones. Jacobus Van Cortlandt purchased the land around sixteen ninety-one and dammed the brook to power a gristmill, creating the sixteen-acre lake that still anchors the park's southern end. His son Frederick built the stone manor house that still stands here in seventeen forty-eight. The City of New York acquired the property in eighteen eighty-eight and opened it as a public park.

Six years later came the invention that made Van Cortlandt famous in sports history. On July sixth, eighteen ninety-five, the Van Cortlandt Golf Course opened as the first public municipal golf course in the United States. Before this moment, golf in America was a game for the wealthy, played at private clubs. Van Cortlandt changed that. It hosted the country's first public golf tournament in eighteen ninety-six, and within a generation the municipal course model had spread to cities across the country, democratizing a sport that had previously been gated behind membership fees.

The course's visitors over the years included Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, and Joe Louis. It was renovated in the two-thousands and remains in operation today, wedged between two elevated subway lines in a park that also contains ancient glacial terrain, one of the oldest public cross-country running courses in the country, and a colonial manor that has been a museum since eighteen ninety-seven.

New York contains multitudes. Sometimes they share a zip code.