BRONX — The final hole of the city's new public golf course is complete, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Wednesday.
The $120 million Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point, a 192-acre top-level course financed by Donald Trump and designed by Jack Nicklaus, was built on the site of a former landfill in Ferry Point Park in Throggs Neck. It will feature 18 holes, a practice facility, rain shelter, bathrooms and snack bar.
Trump will also spend at least $10 million on a new publicly owned clubhouse for the course, construction of which is expected to begin next year.
The course is part of the city’s ongoing $5 billion initiative to restore public park space. Because it's owned by the Parks Department, the course will not charge membership fees.
“We have great public courses around the five boroughs, but we’ve never had a pro tournament-quality public course — until now,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “Ferry Point Park is just the latest example of our work to reuse and re-imagine brownfields around the city.”
The project was first imagined more than 30 years ago to repurpose a decades-old landfill. The Wall Street Journal reported the project, taken over by Trump in 2011, was originally scheduled to finish 12 years and $100 million sooner.
“We had half a golf course out there before Mr. Trump got involved,” Nicklaus said in an interview with the Journal earlier this month. “The problem was finishing it.”
Also according to the press release, the facility has a sustainable design that includes an irrigation system that doubles as a fertilizer distributor, and drainage areas that feed back into the greens so the course will consume only one-quarter the amount of water used by a typical golf course.
It will open for youth programming in the summer of 2014 and is expected to fully open in the spring of 2015.
