Golf
Before all this, the seaside stretch of Lido Beach, a mere hour outside Manhattan, clung to a fading postcard of its former self. The one with new money elites frolicking along the shoreline. The one with flappers dancing the night away, hair bobbed, frills shimmering. The one with the Lido Hotel in the middle of it all — six stories high and flamingo pink. The gall it took to build this thing. A remnant of the Roaring Twenties. Four hundred and forty rooms, a 9,000-square-foot ballroom, the oceanside solarium. The elaborate, rococo-inspired mega-hotel was built by the same architectural firm as the Waldorf-Astoria.
A vestige of what might’ve been, when some envisioned the town of Long Beach becoming “the Venice of America.”
There was little room left in the imagination by the time the scene changed. It was Aug. 28, 1942, when word spread across Long Island that Navy Department officials announced plans to seize control of the Lido Hotel and Country Club and everything else on-property.
“That’s news to me!” its owner, Frank Seiden, told the Brooklyn Eagle.
