UP CLOSE
By James A. Frank
Once upon a time, you could hardly swing a niblick in the Met Area without hitting a golf course architect. C.B. Macdonald, Walter Travis, A.W. Tillinghast, even Willie Park Jr. came to New York to further their design careers. Seth Raynor was nearby on Long Island, while Devereux Emmet was born in the city and a descendant of a founder of Tammany Hall, to boot.
But ever since, the architects are elsewhere. A few notables remain: Rees Jones and Stephen Kay were born locally and still live in New Jersey. And while Tom Doak was born in New York City and Gil Hanse on Long Island, both have long since relocated.
Hoping to prove that if you were made here you can make it anywhere is 40-year-old local Jeffrey Stein, whose career took a giant leap forward last year with the opening of Great Dunes on Georgia’s Jekyll Island. He and fellow architect Brian Ross channeled Travis – one of Stein’s design heroes – redoing nine holes “The Old Man” laid out in 1927 and adding an all-new nine by the sea: The completed public-access layout has received rave reviews for its use of linksland scrub and dunes, fealty to Travis’ styling, environmental sensibility, and reasonable pricing.
It was hardly Stein’s first time working on sandy, links-like soil, or his maiden restoration of a design heavyweight. His two decades building an architectural resume are filled with old masters as well as new classics, showcasing a versatility that he credits to growing up here: “Seeing the variety of terrain and the way the golf courses were laid out in the Metropolitan area has an effect on the way I see golf.”
Born in Armonk, N.Y., Stein played golf with his uncle and older brother. He first saw the work of Emmet, who would become another major influence, caddieing on weekends and summers at Bedford Golf and Tennis Club 10 miles north (he earned a scholarship from the MGA Caddie Scholarship Fund in 2004) . He came to course design from the aesthetic side, drawing on interest in art, photography, and sculpture while doodling holes in school notebooks and laying them out on computerized golf games.
At Brandeis University near Boston, he played on the golf team (“My game was okay, shooting mostly 80s and a few in the high 70s”), majored in economics with a business minor, and didn’t take any classes that might be considered requirements for an aspiring course architect because there weren’t any.
After college, while living on Staten Island and caddieing at Bayonne Golf Club, he reached out to as many architects as possible looking for work and advice. Through the website Golf Club Atlas, in 2007 he connected with Canadian architect Ian Andrew, who suggested applying for a Renaissance Golf Design Internship. Stein wasn’t selected, but Tom Doak sent an encouraging email that included an invitation to meet. He jumped at the chance and headed to Doak’s office in northern Michigan.
There was no job offer, but the meeting had other benefits. He met Renaissance associates Jim Urbina and Don Placek, who told him to keep in touch. And Doak arranged a tour of nearby Crystal Downs, “the most interesting golf course I’d seen in my life up to that point. The 17th hole can only be described as something Salvador Dali might have painted. That hole and the entire course sparked a quest to see and play the best courses in the world.”
In 2008, Urbina invited Stein to Bandon Dunes, where work was underway on Old Macdonald. He would be low man on the construction crew, seeing how a course got built while observing the designers. “I was basically a city slicker plopped down on the Oregon coast, learning to drive tractors and drink black coffee for the first time.”
Thrilled to finally be in the business, Stein’s first task was picking up pea-sized gravel that had accidentally been spread over the triple-wide fairway of the third and 14th holes. After searching for small stones each morning, he spent the afternoons shoveling back sand that had blown out of bunkers. Two days in, the thrill was almost gone.
“On the third day, I looked around and realized that I was following my dreams, that walking around a sandy clifftop overlooking the Pacific was exactly where I wanted to be. I decided to become hyper-focused on the task and literally grid the fairway on my hands and knees so I could capture every stone that was out of place. Eventually, Jim asked me to help him with reshaping a bunker edge to create an easier walk into a very deep bunker. I had officially arrived!”
Urbina, who likes to give out nicknames, quickly tagged Stein “Smiley.”
“Every time I asked him to do something, whether it was blowing wind, pouring rain, or sunshine, he had a smile on his face,” Urbina says. “Even though he was off the clock, not being paid, he was willing to hang around with me at night and put a pin flag in the ground or help me mark something. I realized he would do anything we asked just to be a part of it.”
More opportunities followed. In 2010, he worked in the Met Area for the first time, helping Urbina who was transforming a Tillinghast design into Paramount Country Club in Rockland County, N.Y. In 2012, while Doak and Urbina were restoring Garden City Golf Club, a Travis-Emmet collaboration, Stein did clean-up on the famous 12th green. Other local projects have included Rockville Links (Emmet) and Blind Brook (Raynor) with Urbina; Siwanoy (Ross), Sunningdale (Raynor/Tillinghast), and Pelham (Emmet) with Mike DeVries; and Rockaway Hunt Club (Emmet), Baltusrol, and Quaker Ridge (both Tillinghast) for Hanse.
Stein’s first solo job came in 2020, restoring Emmet’s only links design, Long Island’s Seawane Club. Doing a hole or two a year, he’s relying on an aerial photograph, taken in 1941, that shows the entire back nine, which is nothing but fairways and sand. “The task is to undo previous renovations that got away from the simplicity and beauty of the site,” he says. “It was a blessing to have worked at Rockville Links and at Garden City and bring what I learned to Seawane.”
With so much work in the Met Area, it’s little surprise Stein has chosen to remain living here. He and wife Vanessa – “She loves the beach and I love links golf, so it’s a match made in heaven” – share a “very efficient” one-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
And the work keeps coming. He created a master plan for Mahopac, an Emmet design also in Putnam County, where the work is on-going, and is managing the implementation of Urbina’s master plan for New Jersey’s Essex Fells, which Tillinghast redesigned in the 1920s. This spring, Urbina had Stein out at The Olympic Club in San Francisco building new greens on the Ocean Course.
In 2023, Stein won the World 100 Club Fellowship, which allowed him to study the great courses of Scotland. It was the sort of trip his recent predecessors and past employers, Doak and Hanse, took in their younger days. And we all know how their careers – which also started in the Met Area, remember – are doing.
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