Roughly in the center of the photo, on the New Jersey side of the Kill van Kull, hovering up above the big cylindrical tanks that occupy much of southeastern Bayonne, there's what looks to be a lighthouse. (You can see it more clearly if you zoom in.) I first noticed it a few years ago and just assumed it was a lighthouse, but I never remembered to sit down at my computer and find out for sure.
As impossible as it seems, especially from this angle, it's actually the clubhouse of the $100 million-plus Bayonne Golf Club, a 130-acre Scottish links-style course built atop "a 38-acre municipal landfill and a tract formerly owned by PSE&G that was once considered for a nuclear power plant." (You can see some great shots of the place in this stupid promotional video.) Sited on the waters of Upper New York Bay, amid the industrial landscape of eastern Bayonne (satellite view; bird's-eye view) but only five miles from Wall Street, it's one of the most expensive golf courses ever built, constructed out of 700,000 cubic yards of harbor dredgings, along with "mountains of construction debris and topsoil". Membership in the club is by invitation only, with an initiation fee somewhere around $200,000.
(About two miles farther north along the Hudson County waterfront, even closer to Manhattan, is Liberty National Golf Course, another ultra-exclusive course built on a brownfield. Liberty National opened in 2006, the same year as Bayonne; it was even more expensive to build and costs even more to join.)
Day 764
The beacon of Bayonne
February 1st, 2014
I never had anything against golf – until I watched that video.
I love golf and play regularly, but $200,000 to join? Really? Some people have more money than sense.
My mom lives in Bayonne and, on Sundays, I pick her up and take her food shopping right by the Bayonne Golf Club. We once drove to the Golf Club and asked if we could take a look and we were shooed away from the entrance as if we were some sort of riff raff. (well, I guess we are riff raff to the $200K membership population). But it is really strange to have this fancy golf course a stone’s throw away from Stop & Shop.
hmm..so let’s get some stones….go to the Stop & Shop …. and Play some poor man’s golf?
I’d say crochet but with all this ice and snow…..