New Monuments TV welcomes you to today’s coverage of art appreciation on two golf courses. I am your host, the Golf Widow, joined by my old pal and yours.

The Old Man.

He will cover the action at Pocantico Hills, the New York estate of the Rockefeller family.

I belong in a Hudson River School painting.

I have the mic at Portola Country Club in Palm Desert, California. Supplying intel for the broadcast is our Statistician.

Cecil Hollingsworth designed Portola’s original nine holes in 1970, overseen by the Santa Rosa Mountains, whose highest point is Toro Peak at 8,717 feet above sea level.

Above me on the west terrace is Fritz Woruba’s 1960 «Reclining Figure». First, let’s thank our sponsor. «New Monuments Golf Club: Not Your Grandfather’s Golf Club!»

«Nor Your Grandmother’s!»

Nelson Rockfeller placed «Reclining Figure» as a simulacrum of the world’s largest lateral magma flow behind it, popularly known as the Palisades.

Nelson Rockefeller, 1908 to 1979, politician, philanthropist and grandson of John D. Rockefeller, 1839 to 1937, businessman, philanthropist and one of the richest people in modern history.

Can we get a camera on «Reclining Figure»?

We don’t have permission. Negotiations are ongoing. In the meantime, I went through your photos in the cloud and quite liked the one of Moore & Lopier Construction Corporation and American Bridge Company’s Broadway Bridge (1963), which crosses the Harlem River Ship Canal. The Broadway, a structural steel lift span, is suspended at each corner by two sets of wire ropes. Each set contains 12 ropes that are draped over a main counterweight sheave located on top of the corresponding tower corner. The other ends of the wire ropes are connected to span counterweights. Two electrical drives—one in each tower—raise and lower the lift span. The Broadway also features four buffer cylinders mounted beneath the lift span—one in each corner—to cushion the shock of the lift span as it approaches either the open or closed position. The tops of the steel towers were tapered to be flush with the main span when it was lifted. The IRT No. 1 subway carried you across the bridge to Marble Hill, where you boarded the Metro-North Railroad to Philipse Manor, the point of departure for the shuttle bus to Pocantico Hills.

Without further ado, let’s begin our walks, evaluating as we go. In match play, the winner is the team ahead by more holes than remain to be played.

If I were a betting man, I could characterize Team Pocantico Hills as the prohibitive favorite. Will either side exercise its right to a score adjusted by a handicap? The Rockefellers were in the art game longer than Portola’s residents. We don’t want the broadcast to finish early.

According to reports from both locker rooms, the curators decline to factor in handicaps; and as both teams are at home, we will flip a coin to decide who goes first and who gets the last word.

I don’t have a coin.

Hole 1
Portola: Clubhouse

Pocantico Hills: «Kykuit» (1913, Aldrich and Delano, American)

Hole 2
Portola: «Duck Bridge».

Pocantico Hills: «Large Spiny» (1966, Alexander Calder, American), «L’Erection Logologique Blue» (1967-69, Jean Dubuffet, French).

Hole 3
Portola: «Scramble».

Pocantico Hills: «Sky» (1963, Will Horwitt, American), «Fast Force» (1973-74, Will Horwitt), Sukiya-style Tea House (1962, Junzo Yoshimura, Japanese).

Hole 4
Portola: Honey, Stop the Car! Real Estate.

Pocantico Hills: Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Hole 5
Portola: «The Sentinel» (monthly newsletter).

Pocantico Hills: «The House the Rockefellers Built» (2007, Robert F. Dalzell Jr. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell).

Hole 6
Portola: «The Brain That Wouldn’t Die» (after eponymous 1962 film, dir. Joseph Green, American).

Pocantico Hills: «U-Turn» (1968, Clement Meadmore, Australian).

Hole 7
Portola: Cape Hole.

Pocantico Hills: «Double-Up» (1975, Clement Meadmore, Australian), «Five Lines in Parallel Planes II» (1968, George Rickey, American), Specimen Oak Tree.

Hole 8
Portola: Tancredi’s Memorial Pitstop.

Pocantico Hills: «Knife Edge Two Piece» (1966, Henry Moore, English).

Hole 9
Portola: «Eaux printanières».

Pocantico Hills: Pond.

Hole 10
Portola: «Pineapple Fountain».

Pocantico Hills: «Playhouse» (1927, Duncan Candler, American)

Hole 11
Portola: tbd.

Pocantico Hills: «Granny’s Knot» (1968, Shinkichi Tajiri, Japanese-American).

Hole 12
Portola: «Tree Threesome».

Pocantico Hills: «Lippincott II» (1966, James Rosati, American), «Cigarette» (1961, Tony Smith, American), «Fair Leda» (1968 Kenneth Snelson, American), «Me Viola» (1971, Willy Weber, Swiss).

Hole 13
Portola: Ornithography.

Pocantico Hills: Ornithography.

Hole 14
Portola: Cecil Hollingsworth.

Pocantico Hills: William Flynn.

Hole 15
Portola: «Hippies Use Side Door».

Pocantico Hills: Japanese Garden (1913-17, William W. Bosworth, American).

Hole 16
Portola: «Upside Down Tree, after Robert Smithson».

Pocantico Hills: tbd.

Hole 17
Portola: Santa Rosa and Cottonwood Mountains.

Pocantico Hills: The Palisades.

Hole 18
Portola: Portola Players.

Pocantico Hills: Swimming Pool (1955, William H. Harrison, American).