FEATURE
By Brett Hochstein
Long before I officially made golf architecture my profession, I had a fascination with golf courses and their designs. As such, I’d seek them out via different means – perusing pictures in magazines, reading online writeups, and, when fortunate enough, making actual visits to their grounds.
It was my understanding fairly early on that the golf courses of the New York Metropolitan region were architecturally strong and worth seeking out. The PGA Tour’s annual event at Westchester was always a more interesting one to me; Corey Pavin’s strategic plotting around Shinnecock in 1995 left lasting images in my 9-year-old mind; and my first reading some 22 years ago about Garden City Golf Club on the then fledgling golfclubatlas.com made me yearn to someday see its sublime mix of bold and subtle. It was obvious that getting to the Met Area someday to see its golf would be essential study for my intended career.
For numerous reasons, that would take longer than I’d hope. Despite living in Northern California for the last 16 years and growing up in Michigan, it’s not distance that’s precluded me. In fact, I’m fairly familiar with the area and visited it many times. Having gone to college upstate, I’d made numerous friends from the Met Area, bussed down to the city for fun, and even had landscape architecture class field trips to various spots in Manhattan to visit sites designated for our design studio projects. On top of that, my in-laws are scattered in regions perfectly surrounding NYC, from Philadelphia to western and central New York to New England. In short, I’ve been around the area a lot but often not quite close enough and never with extra time to visit any courses.
In recent years, however, I’ve been able to change that and start to chip away on what is a rather extensive wish list of courses to see. Whether it’s been prioritizing a day or two on a family vacation, tacking some extra course-visit time onto a work trip, or even just recently spending a week there doing nothing but looking at golf courses, I’ve begun to get a sense not just of the courses’ individual design qualities but also some overall trends and traits of the sub-regions surrounding the Met Area.
Some central themes of these visits have emerged. The first theme is the obvious one that I observed from distance decades ago: There is some seriously high-quality golf to be found in the area. The other is depth. I sought out some lesser-known courses, and they all still delivered that same high quality and design intrigue in one way or another. The main theme that I want to highlight and discuss, though, is variety. Variety in this case is multi-faceted: variety of design styles, architects, and landscapes. Thanks to a proliferation of golf courses as well as architects from golf’s Golden Age (roughly from 1900-1935), variety can really exist at any point in any place, but there are some overall themes and variety to be found from one Met Area sub-region to another.
These themes are a credit not just to geography but geology. In my adopted home of California, the contrasts of landscape are numerous and stark – you can find yourself in a completely different setting and microclimate in just a matter of miles. Around New York and the Northeast, those differences and contrasts are broad, blurred, and subtle. They are subtle and broad enough that, upon first glance, places like Winged Foot or Quaker Ridge feel like they could reside in my native home of Southeast Michigan. The golf-scale rolling topography, the hardwood-dominated vegetation with the occasional pine, and the classic-lay-of-the-land designs are all very familiar to what I grew up with. A harder look into these A.W. Tillinghast classics, though, reveals some differences, especially when including the third member of Tilly’s Westchester triumvirate of clubs, Fenway.
The first difference is the presence of rock and rock outcroppings, something that doesn’t exist at all in Michigan’s glacial till-formed Lower Peninsula. Winged Foot is full of little spots of exposed rock poking through the ground, especially in the rough, and you see the same at both Quaker and Fenway. The presence of rock adds texture and a sense of place, as well as perhaps one more thing to guard against with a wayward shot.
The next difference to me is a theme you tend to see all throughout the Met Area: boldness of design features. Quaker and Fenway were two of the first courses I ever saw in the region and I was instantly blown away by the depth of bunkers on holes like Quaker Ridge’s fourth and Fenway’s 14th. That’s the kind of stuff you just don’t quite see anywhere else. Yet it is perfectly fine and common in and around the Met Area.
It’s not just the bunkers either. The greens, which are a more important aspect of golf design than bunkers, are bold at these courses yet in different ways. Winged Foot has its world-famous undulations, deemed “beautiful and scary” by 2006 U.S. Open champ Geoff Ogilvy; Quaker Ridge has its big tilts that can be almost impossible to stop a ball on, and Fenway has a little of everything. Tillinghast was commissioned to “build a man-sized course” at Winged Foot, but it wasn’t just on that site where he constructed such brawny and tough features befitting one of the biggest and toughest cities in the world.
Moving a little further east into Connecticut brings some slight exaggerations to the landscape themes of Westchester. The trees get a little bigger and more dense. The hills get a little choppier and bigger. The rock outcroppings get more frequent and prominent.
Nowhere is this more noticeable than at Round Hill, a low-key Walter Travis design draped over numerous abrupt little hills and winding through some dramatically rocky spots. It’s almost as if the stereotype of rocky, rugged New England golf adheres strictly to state lines and begins right away as you cross over into Greenwich.
Perhaps my strongest impression of the Connecticut Met Area courses is the sense of opportunity they present, particularly when viewed alongside their more widely recognized regional neighbors. It’s interesting that some of the greats of the Golden Age architects did not make their way just a few miles north and east, even though the region offers just as compelling land, settings, and history.
One such place I visited that is making the most of an opportunity is Silver Spring in Ridgefield, where talented architect Brian Schneider is near the end of a redesign that creatively borrows ideas from Devereux Emmet and Walter Travis (of Garden City fame) with strong doses of the quirky, geometric late-Victorian era (but implemented strategically as opposed to penally). Sharp greens contours, unassuming pit bunkers, fallaway greens, cop features, and angled stone walls are all a part of the fun and challenge of the new design. These types of features can feel forced or gimmicky if not properly executed, but at Silver Spring they already fit timelessly. I am a bit jealous of the membership that will get to battle with these delightfully menacing defenses for years to come.
With the Silver Spring project, the renovation work happening at Patterson Club under Jaeger Kovich, and the current reimagining of Stanwich by OCM (Ogilvy, Cocking, and Mead), it’s a very exciting time for golf up in the Connecticut corner of the Met Area, and it will be interesting to see if the momentum keeps up in the coming years.
Jumping across from one corner to another, the western edge of Northern New Jersey feels like a bigger and broader version of Connecticut. The hills are larger and longer, the specimen trees are still mighty, and the exposed rock basically amounts to cliffs. Whereas the trees and landforms of Connecticut make for feelings of contained intimacy, the long, sloping fields found on courses like North Jersey and Somerset Hills are open and pastoral, offering big views of the golf all across the property. Architecturally, these two courses are as compelling as their settings are beautiful: North Jersey features an impressive set of heavily contoured Walter Travis greens (and Travis re-creations by Schneider), and Somerset Hills has the most eccentric version of Tillinghast’s work. With the remnants of an old racetrack and orchard integrated into the design and some bold early examples of Tilly’s design mind at play – the redan second, the undulating fifth green, the ‘Dolomite’ mounds guarding the finish of both four and six, the Principal’s Nose 13th, and the dynamic 14th green – Somerset’s combination of history, originality, and sense of place are almost unmatched in the world of golf.
Southward in central Jersey, the ground settles down a lot, but the golf does not. At Forsgate and Hollywood, it would seem as if the architects turned up the dial to compensate for the simpler pieces of land upon they had.
At Forsgate, MacDonald and Raynor protégé Charles “Steamshovel” Banks employed the trio’s typical tact of highly “built” template holes and features, but it feels like the greens and bunkers are bigger and bolder than their standard effort. Several of my more Banks-savvy colleagues agree with that feeling. What impresses me most about Forsgate though isn’t just the scale of the bunkers and greenpads, it’s the variety of the internal contouring in the greens, which make for all sorts of fun, tricky approach shots and recoveries. That’s the stuff that really makes a course hold its intrigue and value over time.
Closer to the shore, Hollywood is perhaps the boldest and quirkiest effort of an architect known for such. That architect would be Walter Travis again, who, as was apparent at North Jersey, is one of the greatest sculptors of greens to ever live. His preserved works are essential pieces of study for any golf architect or shaper. At Hollywood, though, it’s not just the greens worthy of study. With 180 bunkers ranging in scale from shoulder-width pits to expanses larger than the greens, the sand features will immediately grab your attention (and possibly even overwhelm you). What I really like though is the way the landforms of the bunkers are shaped, which is often abrupt, pointy, and generally unusual. They were made to be “natural,” yet they were not built at a long or large enough scale to properly tie-in to the surrounding land and sell that. However, I find it more intriguing that they don’t really sell the “natural” story; instead, there’s a unique and handcrafted charm to them that stands apart in the golf world.
Jumping across the bays and boroughs to Long Island – home to perhaps the greatest overall collection of courses in the world – the first stop, Garden City Golf Club, is spaciously laid out across the Hempstead Plain.
My visit to Garden City was 22 years in the making, and after finally getting there, it did not disappoint. I’ve long held the belief that the interest of a golf course’s design should not be held back by a site with limited contouring, especially if that site has sandier, well-draining soil. I also contend you do not need to move mountains to create that interest. Now, the features that were created at Garden City in the early decades of the 20th century, first by Emmet and later Travis, may have been the equivalent of mountain-moving back then, but what you see today is rather lay-of-the-land, just with a bunch of pits, hummocks, berms, trenches, and bits of funk mixed in. Those period features contrast wonderfully to simple, wide fairways and greens that sit flush on the landscape, often with a tilt accelerating toward a corner, waiting to siphon up any timidly played shots. There’s a brilliant mix of subtle and bold, and the fast and firm surfaces maximize the playing width and strategies within. This is absolutely one of those courses that you’d never really get bored playing.
While Garden City was Emmet’s first real design effort, he later concentrated more of that at St. George’s. Halfway down Long Island, St. George’s was to Emmet as Pinehurst was to Donald Ross. The land at St. George’s is strikingly dramatic and tumbling, and it smacks you right in the face as you round a corner on Sheep Pasture Road, which bisects the north and south sides of the property. Upon this first sight, I audibly shouted in my rental car, “Holy cow! Look at that!” That land immediately reminded me of some courses in Michigan, and it was then I remembered that Long Island was geologically formed the same way – through glacial deposits and recession – and has much of the same sandier, gravelly soil.
With the land providing plenty of drama, Emmet didn’t have to quite do as much of the prolific and eccentric bunkering that he was known for here. Still, where there are areas with a lot of open space or less “going on,” he knew to ratchet up the creativity. Strings of bunkers with charming little mounds between them break up big areas on main part of the property, shared by holes on the both the front nine and the back. On the plateau of the northern section though, Emmet’s genius shines most. The fourth hole is one that I had longed to see since coming across it on Instagram years ago. It appears to be a simple running approach to a green tucked between two created long grass mounds. Once you get up to it, however, you notice not one but two trench bunkers guarding the front of the green. Another deeper trench at the sides then wraps nearly around the entirety of the green in moat-like fashion. Unfair or sneaky? Perhaps, at least at first. But if you have a sense of humor about golf, it delights more than anything. Whether you find the putting surface or get caught in the pit, you will certainly play the hole differently the second time around.
The perfect bit of golf architecture, however, may very well lie another hour down the LIE. The National Golf Links of America has done as much for the concept of golf architecture as any course in history. Charles Blair MacDonald’s adaptations of great overseas holes changed the thinking of the times, introduced strategy, and showed American golfers what the game really could and ought to be.
There are few things to say about National that haven’t already been said, but what I will emphasize is this: I wish more courses would be as daring, creative, and free in the way in which they offer routes of play for their individual holes. If I had not known so much about the course beforehand, I may very well have gotten lost a few times trying to find the green. That stark departure from “it’s all out there in front of you” is, to me, not so much a negative. Rather, it harkens back to when golf was a true adventure over the landscape, those early players along the Scottish coasts taking on whatever the “Almichty” had dealt them. MacDonald borrowed his ideas from that place and those courses, but beyond just the rote strategies behind them, he succeeded in capturing something more important – that early sense of adventure.
Met Area golf is strong, deep, and varied. The dozen or so courses I’ve described – a collection that would stand alone as perhaps the country’s best on their own – are just a small sample of what there is to offer. I haven’t even gotten into the great C.B. Macdonald/Seth Raynor works at places like Sleepy Hollow and The Creek. Or Herbert Strong’s bold efforts at places like Engineers. Or an underrated Ross at Plainfield. Or a Coore and Crenshaw work some consider as good as Sand Hills at Friar’s Head. Or a pile of other major championship sites at Bethpage, Baltusrol, and Shinnecock. Or a hundred or so other courses that would be top tier in any other city.
Seeing them all is a daunting prospect for a student of architecture like myself who lives on the other side of the country, but great news for members of the MGA.
Brett Hochstein is a golf architect and shaper based in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can find more about his work and thoughts on golf at hochsteindesign.com