The city is spending $97 million to construct a public golf course in the park; it is scheduled to open in the spring of 2014 and to be operated byTrump National and International Golf Clubs. At that point, residents of a borough where more than 30 percent of people live below the poverty line will have what will surely be seen as a welcome opportunity to improve their handicaps (for green fees higher than those at most municipal courses).

The construction of the golf course, which has a long and embattled history — the budget, to cite one aspect, has swelled by $40 million since 2008 — gained renewed attention last week after The Daily News reported that MFM, a contracting company the city is using on the project, had been linked to a troubled outfit, Felix Associates. MFM’s owners have a passive financial interest in Felix Associates, one of whose principals pleaded guilty to bribery charges two years ago.

Although MFM has not been accused of any wrongdoing, the city’s Department of Investigation had recommended that the Department of Parks and Recreation consider hiring an auditor to oversee dealings with the company. The parks department chose not to do so.

Further sullying matters is the unrelated fact that elevated levels of methane gas have been found just outside the golf course’s perimeter during construction. The Ferry Point golf course will sit on a former landfill.

And yet these recent issues would seem entirely peripheral to the more essential question of whether spending tens of millions of dollars and turning over acres and acres of land to a sport whose hourly caloric expenditure falls short of considerably less expensive forms of exercise — Ultimate Frisbee, for instance, or jogging — is really the maximally efficient use of the city’s resources. Arguably, if New York is going to be the place that does everything in its power to keep you from having that second extra-large Pepsi, then it ought to also be the place that does not so aggressively encourage a recreation whose most elite professional players often look as though they should be given gift certificates to Jenny Craig.

Both nationally and locally, golf as a means of passing time would appear to be diminishing in popularity rather than escalating. According to data compiled by the National Golf Foundation, the number of golf rounds played in the mid-Atlantic states in 2011, compared with the previous year, declined by close to 10 percent, representing the sharpest downturn of any region in the country. For the New York metropolitan area, the decline was close to 7 percent.

But consider the broader historical data: In an article in The New York Times in April 1967 chronicling the installation of the city’s first black golf pro, Harold Dunovant, at Kissena Park in Flushing, Queens, it was reported that nearly 890,000 rounds of golf were played on the city’s 12 municipal courses the previous year. In 2011, according to the parks department, 561,000 rounds were played on the city’s 13 courses, despite an increase in population. So golf-oriented were New Yorkers during the middle of the last century that more than 21,000 rounds were played on four courses in January and February of 1967, “a remarkable number,” The Times noted, “considering the bad weather.”

The current mayoral administration appears to be wistful for this languid past. Given Ferry Point’s physical history, the city was obligated to provide environmental remediation no matter what form the site eventually took. The parks department claims that a golf course was selected in part “based on community requests dating back more than 30 years.” To prove the point, a spokesman sent me a letter from Ferry Point neighbors expressing “overwhelming sentiment” in favor of a public golf course. The letter was dated November 1977.

As it happens, the development of the course is causing Ferry Point Park to stand as one of the more egregious symbols of class division in a city already so famously replete with them.  On the eastern side of the park, which will house the golf course, the city has committed tens of millions of dollars to a playground and a waterfront esplanade, among other things.

The vast expanse of the park on the other side of the Whitestone Bridge is a poorly maintained stretch where immigrants commune on the weekends, lampposts are broken and dust swirls up from worn soccer fields. Garbage cans are little in evidence; litter is strewed everywhere. As one young mother who regularly visits the park told me on a Sunday in early September, occasionally, she has been handed trash bags by a maintenance person so that she may clean up herself. Visitors relieve themselves in the woods because the city is only now getting around to building bathrooms.

Someday though, those who come may be able to point binoculars toward the golf champion Phil Mickelson. Park advocates like Peter Harnik at the Trust for Public Land believe that golf courses are best put to use in cities when they can serve multiple functions, open one day a week exclusively for running or walking. At Ferry Point Park, golf will happen seven days a week. “We anticipate having world-class P.G.A. Tour events,” a Trump executive volunteered, “or even a U.S. Open.”