Hostile takeover: how a club with deep pockets fought off a claim of eminent domain
Boardman wasn’t calling to set up a round, although his call was about golf, and Deepdale. “I think we might have an eminent-do-main problem,” Boardman told Herlihy. “I’d like to come to see you and bring Bill Acquavella [another Deepdale board member] with me. We might want to hire your firm.”
Herlihy had been a member at Deepdale for only about five years, but when Boardman mentioned eminent domain, he remembered hearing something about the Village of North Hills, where the club is located, occasionally making noises about trying to take over the club. “I was hardly an eminent-domain expert,” Herlihy says. “But what I had heard seemed far-fetched. I’d never given it much thought.”
Neither had any of the other 185 members at Deepdale–until a series of events in 2005 forced them to think about it. The first was a Supreme Court ruling that raised more than a few legal eyebrows across the country. In Kelo v. City of New London the court ruled, 5-4, that the city in Connecticut could seize private property and hand it over to a private developer in the name of “economic development.”
Deepdale would hardly appear to be a candidate for condemnation. Although its main entrance is on a service road of the Long Island Expressway, once inside the front gate the club exudes a feeling of old wealth. With good reason. Among the club’s members past and present: the Duke of Windsor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Sidney Poitier, Sean Connery, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Frank Gifford, Tom Brokaw, Matt Lauer and Raymond Floyd (Sr. and Jr.), not to mention dozens of big-name, big-money Wall Street types, including Ted Forstmann, Henry Kravis and Stanley O’Neal. Many, if not most, use Deepdale as a second, third or fourth club: a place they can easily get to when they’re in New York (on a weekend morning, the club is less than 15 minutes from the Midtown Tunnel), knowing that the club’s elegant clubhouse and golf course built on 175 tree-lined acres won’t be anywhere close to full.
“We like to talk about the Deepdale aura,” says John Wilson, who has belonged to the club for 20 years and is the only current club member who lives in North Hills. “We probably have about 50 members who use the club once or twice a year, and another 50 who might use it five to 10 times a year. There probably aren’t more than 50 or 60 of us who use it on a regular basis, and a lot of those people spend their summer weekends in the Hamptons. You can come here on a Saturday in July and have only three or four groups on the golf course. People call us a rich-man’s club, but I don’t think there’s any flaunting going on here. Plus,we’ve always had women as members. It has a different feel than a lot of places.”
Ironically, Deepdale had been taken over by eminent domain once before. In the 1950s, the club–which opened in 1924–was taken over to clear space for the Long Island Expressway. (The move to its present location occurred in 1956, the year after the infamous “Deepdale Scandal” rocked golf: Two visitors with 3-handicaps played as a 17 and an 18 in a club competition and won more than $16,000 from a $45,000 calcutta auction.)
Soon after leaving Great Neck, club members acquired the mansion that had been owned by the Grace family (now the clubhouse) and the land around it to rebuild their club. It seemed to fit right into North Hills, one of the wealthiest communities in the Northeast. Most of the homes in the village are inside gated communities and might be described as “Gatsby mansions.”
But there had been talk among some in the village about taking over Deepdale to establish a community golf course. The nearby village of Sands Point had done just that with a private club, the difference being that those members wanted to sell their club. Deepdale’s members had no interest in selling to anyone, at any price.
Author: John Feinstein