![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Bobby-Jones-and-Alex-Smith-at-Lido_May-1929-scaled.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nBefore all this, the seaside stretch of Lido Beach, a mere hour outside Manhattan, clung to a fading postcard of its former self. The one with new money elites frolicking along the shoreline. The one with flappers dancing the night away, hair bobbed, frills shimmering. The one with the Lido Hotel in the middle of it all \u2014 six stories high and flamingo pink. The gall it took to build this thing. A remnant of the Roaring Twenties. Four hundred and forty rooms, a 9,000-square-foot ballroom, the oceanside solarium. The elaborate, rococo-inspired mega-hotel was built by the same architectural firm as the Waldorf-Astoria.<\/p>\n
A vestige of what might\u2019ve been, when some envisioned the town of Long Beach becoming \u201cthe Venice of America.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was little room left in the imagination by the time the scene changed. It was Aug. 28, 1942, when word spread across Long Island that Navy Department officials announced plans to seize control of the Lido Hotel and Country Club and everything else on-property.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s news to me!\u201d its owner, Frank Seiden, told the Brooklyn Eagle.<\/p>\n
By day\u2019s end, signage demanded all guests vacate the property within 24 hours. Everyone, including Seiden, did as told. Common along the Eastern Seaboard during World War II, the U.S. military took what the U.S. military needed. The property along Lido Beach was perfect: nearly 200 acres between the Atlantic Ocean and the intracoastal waterway of Reynolds Channel. The land was especially useful to the Navy thanks to ample free space.<\/p>\n
That golf course? It could fit a makeshift city of 40-50 barracks and pop-up hospital facilities. All it needed was a few bulldozers.<\/p>\n
That is how this all happened.<\/p>\n
How the Lido, a golf course conceived by equal parts audacity and genius, one with a story unlike any other, that lived a turbulent life and, in the end, died an abrupt death, came to find immortality as golf\u2019s lost ark, setting off a series of events so improbable that you end up wondering where today starts and history ends.<\/p>\n
And how, all these years later, you end up in the middle of nowhere, trying to understand all this.<\/p>\n
Exactly where you\u2019d think you would.<\/p>\n
Central Wisconsin.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf he was looking down from the clouds, what would make him grin?\u201d<\/p>\n
This is Mike Keiser Jr. asking a question about a man he never met. A man who died in 1939. A man who designed 18 holes in Long Island that turned into an obsession for an army of golfing Ahabs, including Keiser Jr., his brother Chris and their father, Mike Sr.<\/p>\n
Charles Blair Macdonald spent 1914 to 1917 building the Lido Country Club, in its heyday possibly the greatest golf course in the United States.<\/p>\n
The same course that arrived, or returned, in 2023, as the third layout at Sand Valley, a 12,000-acre golf resort in tiny Rome, Wis.<\/p>\n
How? One might call it persistence. Or delusion. The course was built by the aptly named Dream Golf, the ever-growing golf destination enterprise developed by Mike Sr., now shepherded by Chris and Mike Jr. In the early aughts, Mike Sr. grew fascinated with the possibility of rebuilding Macdonald\u2019s long-lost golf course at Bandon Dunes, his sprawling Oregon resort, but ran into two major issues. 1) The Pacific cliffsides were ill-fitted for the course. 2) Not enough was known about the original design to craft a true replica.<\/p>\n
Instead, architects Tom Doak and Jim Urbina designed a collection of tributes to Macdonald\u2019s template holes \u2014 those the legendary designer considered ideal holes \u2014 creating a course known today as Old Macdonald.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Bobby Jones tees off at the original Lido in 1929. (Courtesy Peter Flory)<\/p>\n
But the original Lido\u2019s lure kept tugging. The Keisers, especially Mike Jr., couldn\u2019t shake the research compiled for Bandon, much coming from Macdonald biographer George Bahto. The idea of what once was, what it must have looked like, felt like, played like. It was romantic, this idea of lost perfection, like Michelangelo\u2019s David breaking free and going on the lam.<\/p>\n
The Keisers weren\u2019t alone. Understand, there exists an entire subuniverse of golf architecture enthusiasts that\u2019d require many thousands more words to explain. Peter Flory, a Chicago-based banking consultant and amateur golf historian, came upon the story of the Lido years ago and, as a hobby, set out to create a working model of the course to play on his golf simulator. In turn, with the help of an online legion, he compiled the largest known collection of photographs, both ground-level and aerial, of Macdonald\u2019s design. Over three years, Flory went on to complete a full 3D rendering of the Lido.<\/p>\n
At Sand Valley, meanwhile, Mike Jr. and Chris Keiser set their eyes on a flat, sandy piece of property across the street from the resort, one with distinct wind patterns, as if rolling off an ocean.<\/p>\n
As word got around that the Keiser brothers were seriously considering rebuilding the Lido, Mike Jr. was connected with Flory. Then Doak and design associate Brian Schneider came onboard as architects. Using Flory\u2019s models, Schneider programmed GPS bulldozers to replicate even the most minor micro-undulations of the original design.<\/p>\n
The plan went forward, despite one notable caution. Mike Sr. had long wondered if a true Lido re-creation was, in truth, a fool\u2019s errand for a destination resort.<\/p>\n
He had a point. The course, as originally intended, was to be played multiple times by inquisitive minds. It was meant to challenge smart players with discernible skills, not high-handicappers looking for a good time. As the journalist Ralph Trost wrote sometime in the 1930s, the Lido was \u201ca Robin Hood in reverse\u201d \u2014 rewarding good players and punishing bad players.<\/p>\n
It was not, in other words, meant for your boozy buddies trip.<\/p>\n
The Keiser brothers understood all this. Doak did, too. They built the Lido anyway.<\/p>\n
Inch by meticulous inch.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause that, in and of itself, is worth doing, because the course was so good,\u201d Mike Keiser Jr. recently said. \u201cBut also because, as soon as we change one little thing, we lose all our credibility. Then it\u2019s no longer C.B. Macdonald.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why, on a hazy summer Sunday morning, you might find yourself out in a disorienting expanse, where you\u2019re unsure what shot is needed next; where from everywhere you can see everything; where the wind cakes sand upon your sweat and the beach somehow bleeds between blades of grass; and where, say around the 11th hole, standing next to a meandering strand of white slat fencing, you say to yourself, \u201cWhere the hell am I?\u201d<\/p>\n
The Lido is a course that\u2019s still coming to be understood.<\/p>\n
Just like the original.<\/p>\n
C.B. Macdonald, in fact, wanted nothing to do with any of this. Nearing 60 years old, and plenty wealthy as a stockbroker, he was already considered a founding father of American golf in the early 20th century. He didn\u2019t need the headache of the Lido.<\/p>\n
Born in Canada in 1855, raised in the United States, and schooled in Scotland, Macdonald made his name as one of the game\u2019s great early amateur players before turning his interest toward architecture. He studied the greatest holes abroad and implemented their styles \u2014 his template holes \u2014 to designs in the U.S. To this day, Chicago Golf Club and National Golf Links Of America, both Macdonald originals, rank among the best in the world.<\/p>\n
A group of powerful men wanted the land between the Atlantic Ocean and Reynolds Channel to be Macdonald\u2019s next classic. The Lido Corporation was led by former state senator William H. Reynold and backed by the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Otto Kahn and other New York aristocrats. Sure, they wanted a course and club on par with any other, but the real deal was the end game \u2014 dicing up the land around the course into hundreds of real estate plots.<\/p>\n
It all sounded good, except for the 115 acres of tidal marshland for the golf course. Macdonald told the investors nothing could be built there. But then came their counter. What if $1.5 million was spent on the construction, roughly three times a typical new course of the era? What if the Lido was the world\u2019s first entirely man-made course?<\/p>\n
Macdonald years later described growing \u201cfascinated\u201d by the chance to create a course from his mind\u2019s eye. \u201cIt really made me feel like a creator,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/GettyImages-530845578-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Macdonald, center, was one of golf\u2019s most brilliant golden age architects. (George Rinhart \/ Corbis via Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Work began in 1914, a mere 20-mile drive from present-day Bethpage State Park, site of next month\u2019s Ryder Cup. The endeavor predated both the town charter of Long Beach and the four-lane, $1 million Long Beach Bridge that would, in time, link the barrier island to Long Island. Macdonald and Seth Raynor, his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and chief engineer, filled the entire property with 2 million cubic yards of sand (at 7 cents a yard); sculpting massive greens, careening berms and enormous hazards. In a bizarre twist of unintentional baton passing, Alister MacKenzie, an upstart young architect who would years later create a course called Augusta National Golf Club, won a magazine competition to design the 18th hole.<\/p>\n
Then came the hard part.<\/p>\n
Golf was, to this point, a relatively new game in the U.S., and the club\u2019s initial members were very rich men, primarily over 50, who weren\u2019t built for blind shots, deep bunkers and ocean winds. One story goes that an early member, after bungling through Lido\u2019s opening three holes, arrived at the famed fourth hole \u2014 a split fairway par-5 \u2014 and, when presented his option to go right or left, responded that he would, in fact, go backwards, and returned to the clubhouse.<\/p>\n
Despite being hailed at opening as an unthinkable feat of engineering, the Lido immediately struggled. Membership numbers sputtered. Some investors hit financial difficulties. Course conditions paid the price.<\/p>\n
But then things turned. World War I concluded. The explosion in U.S. automobile sales made Long Beach more accessible from the city. A booming upper-middle class bought seaside bungalows as soon as they could be built. In one sweep, the Lido became the private club in America, its membership ticking up toward 2,000, its reputation growing right alongside it.<\/p>\n
One by one, greats of the game came, and one by one, they raved. Gene Sarazen. Bobby Jones. Walter Hagen. Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, the top English players of the time, declared the Lido an equal to any links back home. British golf writer Bernard Darwin, the grandson of Charles Darwin, wrote, \u201cThe Lido, judged as a battlefield for giants, is the best, not only in America but in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then came the big play \u2014 a hotel \u2014 seeded by a new group of developers. The six-story pink extravagance was completed in 1928. French windows with white wrought iron balconies. Bronze sconces on every wall. Live orchestra every night. Whatever it took to upstage the likes of Atlantic City and Palm Beach. Lido Beach would be America\u2019s answer to the European Riviera.<\/p>\n
In the middle of it all \u2014 the Lido.<\/p>\n
\u201cA really weird contradiction,\u201d Peter Flory said recently. \u201cC.B. Macdonald didn\u2019t really get the memo that the main intent was to sell real estate, and it\u2019s great that he didn\u2019t, because if he would have built some pandering golf course meant to sell lots or be a resort, then it would have never been famous.\u201d<\/p>\n
Problem is, what Macdonald and Raynor built, and what produced profits, couldn\u2019t coexist.<\/p>\n
The Lido was easified with every season. More and more, the oceanfront reality became more valuable than the design. After an early storm destroyed Macdonald\u2019s original eighth hole \u2014 a lengthy par-3 biarritz running along the shoreline, what Flory calls \u201cmaybe one of the best holes ever\u201d \u2014 a poorly built replica was put in its place. By the late \u201920s, though, the eighth hole was re-routed inland, freeing up the waterfront for more development. As time went on, the Atlantic, once in view throughout the course, was nearly entirely blocked off by cabanas.<\/p>\n
An editorial in the Brooklyn Daily Times pleaded: \u201cGolfers of wealth and influence should get together and devise some means of saving the course.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wealth and influence? Both took a hit in 1929. The Great Depression would leave the Lido looking more and more unrecognizable, stirring rumors in the early \u201930s of it possibly being shuttered and converted entirely into real estate. One last renaissance came at the decade\u2019s end, sparking major improvement around the course, but the advent of World War II ended all of that.<\/p>\n
Seiden, only a few years removed from purchasing the Lido club and hotel for $960,000 in 1940, rented the entire property to the Navy for one year. In 1943, with the Navy having transformed much of the land, he sold it outright for $1.3 million.<\/p>\n
With that, the short, odd, bedeviled life of Macdonald\u2019s Lido was over.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/BCarter_Lido_11_2-1-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The new Lido opened in 2023 at Sand Valley. (Brandon Carter \/ Sand Valley)<\/p>\n
On a Sunday afternoon earlier this summer, next to the nondescript clubhouse near the Sand Valley Lido\u2019s first hole, four friends climbed onto a shuttle for a ride across the resort. Shirts untucked, hats perched lopsided atop heads, they looked as if they\u2019d spent the previous four hours lined up against the Wisconsin Badgers defensive line.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow\u2019d it go?\u201d one was asked.<\/p>\n
A loaded question, apparently. The four responded with faraway stares. Having paid $275 apiece for the pleasure of a Lido tee time, the group played 15 holes and called it quits. The course? Too hard. The 30- and 40-mile-per-hour winds this morning? Too taxing. The carousing? Non-existent.<\/p>\n
Did we not mention the new Lido is dry? Right, the Keisers, wanting their time machine to be about golf and only golf, have installed a no-alcohol policy. No, it\u2019s not a nod to the course\u2019s prohibition era roots. It is, in fact, a nod to its bundle of contradictions.<\/p>\n
The Lido is, at its core, a private club. Between 150 and 200 members, mostly hardcore fans of Macdonald\u2019s Golden Age classic, hail from nearby Chicago and Milwaukee, and from as far away as Atlanta and San Francisco.<\/p>\n
It is, at the same time, part of the Sand Valley resort. Restricted play is available for guests from Sunday through Thursday. Many who include the course in their trip understand exactly what they\u2019re walking into. Some don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe 25 to 35 percent of the guests who play it, it\u2019s their favorite course,\u201d Keiser said. \u201cBut at the same time, I think it\u2019s also the most consistently disliked course by our guests. Then there\u2019s a group in the middle.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just as the original Lido proved, no course can be all things to all people.<\/p>\n
Even on the outside, the highly convoluted world of golf course rankers and raters don\u2019t know what to make of the ghost ship in Wisconsin. It\u2019s long been believed that, had the original Lido design never been mangled, it would undoubtedly stand with the likes of Pine Valley and National Golf Links as the best in the country. So, what do you do with the Sand Valley Lido? How much should it be dinged for not having, you know, an ocean? And whom do you credit \u2014 Macdonald and Raynor or Doak and Schneider?<\/p>\n
This Lido debuted at No. 68 among Golf Magazine\u2019s top 100 courses in the world and No. 69 on Golf Digest\u2019s list. Too high? Too low? Who knows? At No. 12 on Digest\u2019s top 100 public courses in America, it outpaces its cousins at the resort\u2014 Sedge Valley (51), Mammoth Dunes (25) and Sand Valley (12).<\/p>\n
At a loss, Garrett Morrison, the head of architecture content for Fried Egg Golf, compares the Sand Valley Lido to \u201cThe Grey Album,\u201d Danger Mouse\u2019s 2004 underground mashup of \u201cThe Black Album\u201d from Jay-Z and \u201cThe White Album\u201d from the Beatles. He\u2019s sort of joking, sort of not.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s obviously an incredible achievement,\u201d Morrison explained, \u201cbut there\u2019s also some post-modern bizarreness going on. Here\u2019s this course, brought back to life, in a completely different place, in an altered state. That was the feeling that overcame me when I played it. It was just \u2014 this is amazing, but this is so f\u2014ing weird.\u201d<\/p>\n
Weird can, of course, mean many things. It\u2019s weird that nothing about the Sand Valley Lido feels counterfeit or synthetic or forced. It\u2019s weird that for four hours or so, you feel like you\u2019re eavesdropping on the past. It\u2019s weird that titans of another time once played the same course with hickory shafts and knickers hiked high. They did, except they didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/BCarter_Lido_8-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
A classic Biarritz green awaits golfers at the Lido\u2019s eighth hole. (Brandon Carter \/ Sand Valley)<\/p>\n
Some will get it. Some won\u2019t. Regardless, Mike Keiser Jr. says, unlike the original, this Lido has a clear goal.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to be the most welcoming club in America, and part of that is welcoming guests to play it,\u201d he said. \u201cMost of the membership is proud to be the custodians of this place. I\u2019m sure there\u2019s a silent group of people that don\u2019t express their frustration, but I don\u2019t really care because I know this is the right thing to do. Our core members who play regularly think it\u2019s really cool, and I think we can be leaders in inspiring other clubs to reconsider their guest policies.\u201d<\/p>\n
What if that ends up as the legacy of what Macdonald created? Would probably make him smile, no?<\/p>\n
The old Lido Hotel came alive again in the 1950s and \u201960s. Formal balls and cocktail parties. Gowns and tuxedos. Cab Calloway and Sammy Davis Jr. performing under the open skylight of the Starlight Room, an oceanfront nightclub with a retractable roof. But those times, like the ones before them, passed. The property changed hands again and again. In 1978, what was known as the Lido Beach Cabana Club was up for auction, selling off everything from 6,000 pieces of china to a 1,000-gallon lobster steamer to a Steinway grand piano. The hotel was converted into modern, luxury condominiums. To this day, the building\u2019s pink twin cupolas still tower over the shoreline, surveying the land.<\/p>\n
As for the course, over on Long Beach, little of Lido remains. Hope lingered through the \u201940s that parts might be salvageable, but by the time Seiden bought the land back from the Navy in 1947, the original design was too far gone. Seiden opted to hire architect Robert Trent Jones to build a new course on an adjacent piece of property, what is now the municipal Lido Golf Club in south Nassau. The 14th hole, a split fairway par-5, is a nod to the old fourth hole. A Sunday tee time runs $43 for residents, $55 for non-residents. Across the street, where the Lido once stood, is now the site of Long Beach Middle School and a public beach for the Town of Hempstead.<\/p>\n
So, did C.B. Macdonald\u2019s course disappear? Or does it live?<\/p>\n
Hard to say. Maybe it just depends on where you\u2019re standing.<\/p>\n
And what you want to see.<\/p>\n
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb \/ The Athletic; Photos: Courtesy Sand Valley, Peter Flory)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before all this, the seaside stretch of Lido Beach, a mere hour outside Manhattan, clung to a fading…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":183980,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[1430,62,222,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-183979","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-golf","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-sports-business","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115110422554730378","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}