Just off Horse Hollow Road in Locust Valley, NY, square in the midst of Long Island’s tony “Gold Coast,” and up the street from the more widely known Piping Rock Club, exists a strip of grass stitched with sand and scrub barely wide enough for two par 4s to brush past each other. Rolling down through old-growth forests and broadening across low dunes, this priceless parcel dead-ends the way so many of its neighboring estates do: with a knockout view across Long Island Sound. It’s been farmed and fished, planted and cleared, and spent two unlucky decades as the home of a high-caliber New York attorney. But a century ago, power brokers of a different sort stepped in and transformed the property into what it was always meant to be: one of the nation’s finest golf courses.

Welcome to The Creek Club.

The attorney’s name was Paul Cravath, and he built his mansion atop the crown of the property’s dunes in 1890. By 1914, as he watched the home burn to the ground for the second time in six years, he had had enough. In swooped a group that included Vincent Astor, J.P. Morgan, Marshall Field and CB Macdonald, who immediately found a better use for the ruined home’s fieldstone foundation—as a buttress for the elevated sixth tee box.

TGJ No. 23 features No. 6, a downsweeping two-shotter that architect of record Gil Hanse has tapped as his favorite on the course. But as compelling as that hole’s “leaky punchbowl” green complex may be, it only hints at the delights awaiting the golfer throughout the property, both on-course and off. Subtlety and class rule the day, with the decades of spike marks impressed into the locker room’s mahogany benches a reminder to today’s players of the generations who have teed it up before them. For years, The Creek laid low even within its own ZIP code, but after a Hanse’s 2017 restoration, this century-old club is stepping out of the shadows.

Yardage Book: No. 6 at The Creek

Locust Valley, NY. Par 4, 450 yards

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Yardage Book: No. 6 at The Creek

Locust Valley, NY. Par 4, 450 yards

Read Now