Garden City Golf Club

Walter Travis routed Garden City Golf Club in 1899 on a piece of central Long Island land in the village of Garden City, New York. The course was Devereux Emmet's original 1899 design that Travis substantially redesigned in 1906 after he had won three U.S. Amateur championships (1900, 1901, 1903) and had begun his second career as an architect and golf writer. The Travis redesign — particularly the green complexes — became the defining architectural vocabulary of the course and remains the routing modern players know. Travis preached crowned, contoured, small green complexes throughout his architectural writing of the 1910s and 1920s, and Garden City is the most-visible application of that vocabulary in his own work.

The course plays around 6,950 yards par 73 from the back markers, with fescue rough and a slope in the upper 130s. Garden City hosted the 1902 U.S. Open and several early U.S. Amateurs. The fairways play firm given the sandy Long Island subsoil, and the bunkers — Travis's signature deep, steep-walled traps with grass faces — are among the most-photographed in American club golf. The fifteenth hole is a 426-yard par-4 with a green set behind a deep cross-bunker complex; the seventeenth, a 364-yard par-4 with a green tucked behind a natural bunker stretch, is one of the most-quoted Travis design pieces.

Garden City is private and access is members and accompanied guests only. The membership is small and historically composed of Long Island business families with multi-generation ties to the club. The hospitality model is traditional and the club has stayed largely outside the destination-private trend of the post-2000s era. Garden City Country Club, a separate institution next door, hosts most of the area's tournament play.

Long Island coastal climate gives Garden City a playing season of April through November. The course closes through brief winter cold snaps. The fescue gets golden through August and September, and the original Travis routing has remained substantially intact through the club's history.