Alley Pond Golf Center spent ten million dollars this summer, and not one cent of it built a new hole. The turf came out and went back in. The bays got new bar simulator technology. Knox Golf Academy signed on as an operator, the ribbon got cut on July 24, and the New York City Parks Department stood behind the whole project as a partner rather than a landlord collecting rent from a private developer. But the driving range itself, wedged between the Long Island Rail Road tracks and Northern Boulevard, has been sitting on that same city-owned parcel for decades. Ten million dollars changed almost everything about how it feels to golf there. It changed nothing about where it is.
That distinction turns out to be the whole story of how Douglaston updates itself. Follow the thread from the golf center down through the preserve at the edge of the peninsula and into the dining room two blocks from the train platform, and the same habit keeps showing up. Nothing gets torn down and started over. It gets funded, restored, handed to a scout or a son, and kept running under the name it already had.
The Range Everyone Already Knew
Knox Golf Academy founder Fei Ren framed the reopening as a statement about access rather than novelty. "This project represents much more than a golf renovation," she said. "It reflects our belief that golf should be welcoming and accessible to everyone. We are honored to partner with NYC Parks to preserve this historic facility while creating new opportunities for families, young people, and future generations to enjoy the game." The word doing the work in that quote is preserve. The upgrades, new turf, updated bays, simulator rooms, were built to make an existing public facility usable for longer, not to replace it with something else. For a neighborhood where the driving range has been part of the daily backdrop for years, that framing matters more than the dollar figure.
The Preserve That Gets Fixed One Summer at a Time
The pattern goes back further than this year, and it runs through an organization most residents drive past without noticing: the Udalls Cove Preservation Committee, founded in late 1969 by Aurora Gareiss, a Douglaston resident who looked out at the marsh from her own home and decided it needed saving. The group's first cleanup happened on a Saturday morning in April 1970, the same month as the first Earth Day. By 1972 the city had designated nearly 33 acres of wetlands, forest, and salt marsh between Douglaston and Great Neck Estates as a protected preserve. That acreage has not changed since. What has changed, continuously, is how much of it gets actively restored in any given year, and by whom.
In March 2026, the committee was awarded a $125,000 grant from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to remove invasive species from a 1.5-acre section of the North Ravine, an area choked with Japanese knotweed, multiflora rose, porcelainberry vine, and invasive Norway maple trees. The grant carries a 25 percent match requirement, or $31,250, which the committee is covering from an earlier $75,000 grant it received from Con Edison. The design work for that project is expected to wrap this summer, after which the group will file for wetlands permits from the state and construction permits from the city parks department. In other words: the paperwork that determines whether that 1.5 acres gets cleared is being finalized this summer, the same season the golf center's ribbon got cut a short drive away.
None of this happens through a single contractor working a single job. It happens one small, named build at a time, usually by a teenager finishing an Eagle Scout project.
| Year | Builder | What Got Built |
|---|---|---|
| 2013 | Eagle Scout David Guapisaca | Bridge, Virginia Point section |
| 2014 | Eagle Scout Joseph DeRege | Bridge, North Ravine Trail (Little Neck side) |
| 2016 | Eagle Scout Clifford Lew | Bridge, Old Oak Pond Trail |
| 2017 | Eagle Scout Amesh Sarecha | Walkway, Aurora Pond section |
| 2018 | Eagle Scout Candidate Jack Paganucci | Wooden walkway, North Ravine Trail |
| 2019 | Eagle Scout John Palmadessa | The "39 Steps," connecting Depew and Orient Avenues |
| 2022 | Eagle Scout Brady Bosse | First half of a 64-foot walkway, Virginia Point |
| 2023 | Eagle Scout Rain Gan | Second half of that walkway, with his Troop 10 crew |
| 2024 | Eagle Scout Nick Tonorezos, Troop 71 | Phase 1, Great Neck Estates marsh-edge trail |
| 2025 | Chris and Nic Katsoulis; Max Tonorezos, Troop 71 | Additional phases of the same trail |
| 2026 | Troop 71 (planned) | Fifth and final phase of the Great Neck Estates trail |
A decade of teenagers, one build at a time, is not a marketing strategy. It is closer to a civic habit that residents have simply come to expect, the same way they expect the osprey pair to return to the nesting platform near the Douglaston LIRR station each spring, as they have since the committee installed its first platform there in 1997.
Dinner Hasn't Changed Ownership Since 1985
Walk a few minutes from that same train platform and the pattern holds at the dinner table. Il Toscano Ristorante opened on 235th Street in 1985, when Mauro Privilegi decided to bring what he had learned cooking on Italian cruise lines and, later, over nineteen years at the Hotel Pierre in Manhattan, out to a neighborhood he thought deserved better Italian food than it was getting. His son Alex trained at the Culinary Institute of America and spent a year cooking in Montefollonico, Italy, before coming home to cook alongside his father. Forty-one years later, the two of them are still the ones you will find in the kitchen most nights, and diners posting reviews as recently as July 2026 are still ordering the lobster linguini and the semolina crusted shrimp, still parking for free in the valet lot the restaurant shares with the adjacent LIRR station.
That restaurant anchors a small cluster of dining along Douglaston Parkway and Northern Boulevard that has grown up around it over the years, including Giardino and Kuksoo, which round out the strip with Italian and Asian fusion options. None of it reads like a food hall or a curated retail development. It reads like a handful of family businesses that have been doing their version of the same thing for a long time, sitting close enough together that you can walk between them.
So What Actually Changed This Summer
If you want the short version of what is genuinely different in Douglaston right now, it comes down to this:
- Alley Pond Golf Center reopened on July 24 after a $10 million renovation built through a partnership between Knox Golf Academy and NYC Parks
- The Udalls Cove Preservation Committee is finishing the design phase on a $125,000 state-funded restoration of 1.5 acres in the North Ravine, work expected to be ready this summer
- The fifth and final phase of the Great Neck Estates marsh-edge trail is planned for later this year, the latest in a string of Eagle Scout builds stretching back to at least 2013
- Il Toscano is still turning out the same lobster linguini it has served since 1985, now under a second generation of the Privilegi family
Every one of those updates ran through an existing structure rather than a new one: public parkland, a decades-old civic nonprofit, a family kitchen. That is not an accident of small-town charm. It is closer to a description of how Douglaston tends to spend its money and its time, in increments, through the same names, on the things that were already here.
If you have lived in Douglaston long enough to remember the driving range before the renovation, or you are just now learning what the trail behind Church Street connects to, Joanne Hantzopoulos is always glad to talk about the neighborhood, whether or not a move is anywhere on your mind. Let's Connect.