‘Rembrandt’ of Courses Will Draw Golfers To Place With a Past
Built Over Toxic-Waste Site, New Jersey Links Seeks Moneyed Manhattanites Retirement Funds
By JOSEPH PEREIRA

JERSEY CITY, N.J.—At a projected cost of $129 million, the golf course under construction here on the banks of New York Harbor is one of the most expensive ever built.

The budget for the Liberty National Golf Course project surpasses the $39 million casino boss Steve Wynn spent building a course outside Las Vegas, and the $105 million that Donald Trump is spending on a new Los Angeles links. It’s a lot of money to sink into anything built on a toxic-waste site.

Toxic-waste sites, it turns out, are popular places for golf courses. Golfers spend less time on the land than workers or homeowners, and their turf doesn’t weigh as much as office towers — which can squeeze toxins out into the surrounding area. Over the past 40 years, more than 70 courses have been built on such land — many of them former landfills — and eight are under way in New Jersey.

Liberty National is the expression of a lifelong dream of sneaker magnate Paul Fireman, a golf lover who is personally bankrolling the project. Mr. Fireman says he wants to create a spectacular course that will play host to championships and become the premier destination for the golfing elite of Manhattan, just 2.5 miles across the water from the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan.

"I’m not into building golf courses for the sake of golf courses. We’ve got enough of them," says Mr. Fireman, who is chairman of Reebok International Inc. "What I want to do here is build another Augusta…. I want to produce a Rembrandt."

Perched above the harbor, Liberty National will have dramatic views of the Statue of Liberty, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and the New York skyline. Plans call for an initiation fee of $300,000 to $400,000—among the highest anywhere— and a high-speed private ferry to whisk members from Wall Street to dock near the first tee in just 12 minutes. The club, set to open on July 4, 2006, is recruiting members.

Blueprints feature five lakes, a waterfall, four streams, underground air ducts to optimize turf moisture and several acres of wetlands for migratory birds and other wildlife. Mr. Fireman, whose personal fortune has been estimated at $800 million, has stipulated that 5,000 maple, oak and evergreen trees for the course be transplanted fully grown. In recent months, bulldozers and backhoes have begun sculpting the undulating design, crafted by golf architect Robert Cupp and pro Tom Kite, the 1992 U.S. Open winner.

But underground, the state of New Jersey says, much of the land harbors toxic lead, arsenic, beryllium, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), petroleum residues, chromium and other leavings from the defunct oil refineries, factories and U.S. Army training facility that all once operated on the site.

Before Mr. Fireman took over the land, previous owners spent $29 million on cleaning up the site. Remediation included layering two feet of soil over 120 of the 170 acres planned for the course, and covering 15 acres of some of the more potent stuff with a half-inch thick polyethylene blanket.

As part of a new "brownfields to greenfields" program for reclaiming some of the state’s 10,000 Superfund sites, toxic-waste dumps and contaminated landfills, New Jersey has given its blessing and aid to the Liberty National project and about a half-dozen other golf course developments on toxic sites.

Many of the formerly toxic golf courses were developed in the 1990s, as environmental regulators struggled to find ways to make use of polluted land. One of them, Whistling Straits Golf Course in Haven, Wis., was the site of the PGA Championship tournament earlier this month.

Golf and parks are favored for sites like Liberty’s because they are too dirty for residences or offices. It takes only about four hours to play a game of golf. So the exposure to potentially hazardous fumes is much less than a resident or office worker would get. "A lot of times the land is not compacted enough to withstand the weight of a building," says Linda Garczynski, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s brownfields director.

In a number of cases, golf courses on polluted grounds have erupted. Bowling balls, car bumpers and old newspapers have mysteriously appeared on some courses as the soil used to cap the contaminants shifted and eroded. The Phoenix Golf Links in Grove City, Ohio—built four years ago on a capped trash dump—has been the butt of a lot of jokes around town and by the local media, says Mike Thomas, the course’s assistant golf pro. As a result, patronage has suffered, he adds. Columns of dark smoke rise from a factory on the property that burns methane gas seeping from below the course. And the course has to be shut down from time to time for inspections and repair. All told, about a dozen pollution-to-golf projects have had such problems.

Mr. Kite, a veteran of the Professional Golfers Association tour, says Liberty National can’t afford such an occurrence. "Imagine the Goodyear blimp flying over the course during a nationally televised major tournament, and there on one side is the Statue of Liberty, and there on the other some ooze bubbling up from somewhere on the course," he says.

To insure against any mishaps, Liberty National crews are taking extra precautions. Beyond the state-mandated two feet of soil previously placed, Liberty National has added a minimum of two more coursewide, unloading 1.5 million cubic yards of sludge and soil in 75,000 truck trips over the past two years. Mostly to meet environmental demands, Mr. Cupp says, he has gone back to the drawing board 98 times, making Liberty the "most intense" of the 250 golf courses he has built in his 35-year career.

Only after he completed his first drawings did Mr. Cupp learn about state requirements for wetlands. So, to provide habitat for the black-crowned night heron, he redesigned the course to include a 75-foot buffer on either side of a creek that was already in the plans. Three acres of salt marsh were also set aside for terrapins.

Mr. Cupp also found out that the five oval lakes he had designed weren’t up to snuff. The water from rain-fed lakes can pickup contaminants from the ground, so the architect had to widen and deepen the lakes by several feet to accommodate drains and to add pumps.

Mr. Cupp thought he was finally finished after designing the "picturesque finale"— an 18th hole built in the seaside Scottish Links style, with a green on the edge of a bluff 50 feet above the harbor. But shortly after, environmental engineers told him that the green covered the precise spot where a manhole was mandated to test groundwater for contaminants.

Because the manhole would have disfigured the green, Mr. Cupp changed the blueprint again, to place it under a sand bunker about seven yards away. Then he had to wait nearly a year for complicated engineering calculations—factoring in tides and possible ground shifts—before he could determine how high to place the manhole cover. A few months ago, the calculations were finally done and Mr. Cupp made his last change. He raised the manhole—and the crest of the green—by three inches.

Mr. Fireman says there’s no need for golfers to worry about any risks from the site. "The toxic waste is not an issue," he says. In some areas of the course, he notes, the earth over the waste will be as much as 50 feet deep. Whether the golf course will make money is another question. The number of golfers has steadily grown over the past four years to 27.4 million in 2003 from 25.4 million in 2000, according to the National Golf Foundation, an industry tracker. But the number of rounds played has steadily slipped over the same period, to 494.9 million in 2003 from 518.4 million in 2000.

Mr. Fireman’s son, Daniel Fireman, who is in charge of the golfing venture, says, he hopes the new club "will break even," but adds, "it’s probably going to lose a little bit of money."

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