The Lido

The Lido is the down-to-the-inch recreation of C.B. Macdonald's lost 1917 Long Island masterpiece, rebuilt by Tom Doak and Brian Schneider on Wisconsin sand dunes and opened in 2023. The original opened on reclaimed marshland on Long Island's south shore and was considered one of the finest courses in the world before the U.S. Navy reclaimed it in 1942. For eight decades the Lido existed only in photographs and increasingly mythical reputation. The Renaissance team spent years studying those photographs, original survey maps, and written accounts to put every green complex and bunker position back where they belonged, this time on the glacial sand of Adams County.

Macdonald was the great collector of golf hole templates, and The Lido contains his greatest concentration of them. The Redan, the Alps, the Cape, the Short, the Channel: each appears in a form faithful to Macdonald's original interpretation. The Channel hole is particularly worth noting; it was the subject of the first-ever course architecture competition, and Dr. Alister MacKenzie's winning entry, submitted before he designed Augusta National, is preserved in Doak's reconstruction. Greens are large and contoured, with internal slopes creating multiple pin positions of varying difficulty. The course rating of 74.5 and slope of 148 are the highest at the resort. Difficulty is architectural rather than physical; you do not need extraordinary length, but you need thoughtful positioning and an understanding of how the ground feeds the ball.

For architecture nerds, a conversation with a ghost. For everyone else, an excellent and demanding 18 through beautiful sand-dune terrain.