A new mayor is directing a renovation of a Tom Bendelow-designed course that his gritty city closed last year for improvements that it hopes will help break the cycle of deficits, unemployment and crime.
In taking office early last year, Lester E. Taylor III, the new mayor of East Orange, N.J., inherited all of the problems known to gritty New Jersey cities like his, from a deficit and blight to unemployment and crime, The New York Times reported. And Taylor had one additional difficulty not shared by most of his mayoral peers: a golf course.
Not just any golf course, either, the Times noted. It was in the rarefied Short Hills section of Millburn, N.J.—10 miles and a world removed from the urban streets just outside East Orange City Hall. A course that few of the city’s residents ever see, much less play.
The East Orange Golf Course, which covers more than 150 acres of extremely valuable real estate, once provided a pastoral escape for the city’s golfers, the Times reported. But with time’s passage, it became shaggy and underused, with a shuttered restaurant and greens made challenging more by poor maintenance than by design.
As the new mayor, Taylor studied the course’s scorecard, the Times reported. It was operating $372,000 in the red, its number of rounds was plummeting and its clubhouse was a musty tribute to groovy 1970s aesthetics. “If you wanted a cold beer or something to eat?” Taylor said. “Guess what, you can’t.”
Mayor Taylor had campaigned on a platform of “reimagination” for his city, which straddles the inner-city vibe of Newark and the suburban hum of South Orange, the Times reported. But if the municipality was to be run more like a business, he had to address the casual management of a golf course detached both physically and psychologically from the city itself.
So just as the 2014 golf season was beginning, the mayor called a timeout, the Times reported, and he and the East Orange City Council abruptly closed the course. This naturally leading to speculation that the city planned to sell the property—in one of the country’s most exclusive ZIP codes—for redevelopment.
But East Orange had other plans for its Short Hills oasis, the Times noted. During its prosperity more than a century ago, the city had bought more than 2,000 acres of farmland in and around Millburn, to secure well fields that could help provide water to its residents. Then, in the mid-1920s, Scottish golf course architect Tom Bendelow—described by the Times as “the Johnny Appleseed of American golf”—was retained to chart an 18-hole course beside the water reserve.
In the city’s annual report for 1926, a section proudly noted that the city’s just-opened golf course “has been pronounced by experts to compare favorably with the most expensively built private and club courses in the country,” the Times reported.
As the years then passed, the demographics of East Orange changed from mostly white to mostly black, and from upper-middle-class to middle-class, working-class and poor, the Times reported. Short Hills, meanwhile, has become so affluent that even its mall “smacks of the 1 percent,” the Times noted, with no Marshalls or Modell’s sporting goods stores, but a Tesla Motors, as well as stores devoted to “fine writing instruments” and “the art of shaving.”
The United States Census Bureau further maps the chasm between the two communities that are separated by 10 miles, the Times noted. The median value of a house in Short Hills, for example, is well north of $1 million; in East Orange, it is about $228,000. More than 87 percent of Short Hills residents have college degrees; in East Orange, 16 percent. And the median household income in Short Hills is about $225,000; in East Orange, $38,000.
But East Orange has some attributes that Short Hills lacks, the Times added: An ethnically diverse population of 64,000 (including what Taylor says is the country’s second-largest population of Guyanese). A housing stock featuring modest apartments and historic homes. Its own water utility. Easy access to the Garden State Parkway. A musical heritage that includes Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, Queen Latifah and Dionne Warwick.
And the East Orange Golf Course.
In recent years, the Times reported, the nearly forgotten golf course only gained public attention for the wrong reasons. In the early 1990s, the East Orange mayor and the golf course manager at the time pleaded guilty to stealing thousands of dollars in membership dues, including fees paid by a group called the Garden State Duffers.
A few years later, John Ferolito, a founder of the company that makes AriZona iced tea, hooked a ball off the 16th tee that hit a man in his group between the eyes, knocking him unconscious and causing serious injury and leading to an ensuing lawsuit.
And when faced last year with what to do with its fabled, troubled golf course, the Times reported, East Orange decided to take a mulligan.
In temporarily closing the course, city officials never lost sight of the real estate’s potential, the Times noted. As a city report put it, “While the current demographics of the City of East Orange do not indicate a large golfer population, the demographics of the golf course area are quite the opposite.”
The city eventually received state authorization for $6 million in bond financing to renovate the course and replace the clubhouse and restaurant, the Times reported. It hired well-known golf course architect Stephen Kay (who has also recently renovated the former Torresdale-Frankford Country Club course for the Union League of Philadelphia) to oversee the makeover, and Juan Casiano to serve as the on-site superintendent. All of this provided “a more professional golf sensibility,” the Times reported.
One recent hot morning, the Times noted, Casiano sat in a small office a few yards from the East Orange course’s closed clubhouse, work gloves tossed on the floor, chain saws stacked on a shelf. On the wall hung a calendar, a few Post-it notes and a framed certificate from the Rutgers Professional Golf Course Turf Management School.
His sweat-dappled assistant, Ed Sylvia, walked in, and the two men slipped into a foreign language that could best be called “Turfese,” full of phrases such as “low-mow blue” and “850” and “lapping it and checking the cut.” The conversation reflected “the agronomical challenge just outside the door,” the Times reported.
Casiano, lean, intense and 40, had worked his way up in the insular world of golf course maintenance, the Times reported. After earning a degree in business management, he got a job at the Atlantic City Country Club as a grunt, whacking weeds and watering grass by hand. He moved on to other courses, continued his education in the field and developed a reputation after helping to resuscitate a tired course in Atlantic County.
Last fall, the Times reported, Casiano was hastily summoned to East Orange, a city he had never visited, for a first interview for the golf superintendent’s job. Afterward, he put on his work boots and, in suit and tie, walked the course for a couple of hours, taking in the uneven tee boxes, the water drainage problems and the overgrown fairways.
“Not in good shape,” Casiano recalled for the Times. But when offered the job, he understood Mr. Kay’s vision and knew what had to be done.
Late this spring, the Times reported, a modified version of the renovated East Orange Golf Course opened to the public, offering occasional hazards, caused by in-process construction equipment and activity, not often seen along the fairway. But all of that is temporary, Casiano promised. A year from now, he said, the greens will be tight, the fairways true and the new clubhouse restaurant stocked with food and drinks.
Of the more than 150 people who have already signed up for discount cards or season passes, the Times reported, 19 are East Orange residents, in realization of the course’s original purpose: to provide bucolic enjoyment to the city’s residents. Of course, its other purpose is what Mayor Taylor calls “a tremendous business opportunity”: to capture and redirect some of that Short Hills wealth back into East Orange.
Because while the city of East Orange may not have a store dedicated to the “art of shaving,” the Times noted, it does have a golf course with potential, in place called Short Hills that is both close, and distant.
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