History of Public Golf in America

Public golf in America began almost as a fluke and grew into the dominant form of the game. The Van Cortlandt Golf Course in the Bronx opened on 6 July 1895 as the first public municipal golf course in the United States, only seven years after John Reid's Apple Tree Gang had organized St Andrew's of Yonkers. A group of Riverdale businessmen who had tried and failed to assemble enough private land for a club had petitioned James A. Roosevelt of the Parks Board for permission to lay out a course on city land; the city agreed on the condition that it be open to all, with the Mosholu Golf Club retaining only two afternoons a week. The original 2,561-yard nine-hole layout cost $624.80, was expanded to eighteen holes by 1899 (with a clubhouse following in 1902), and was almost immediately overrun: weekend traffic reached 700 golfers within its first decade. The country's first public golf tournament took place there in 1896, and Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Joe Louis, and the Three Stooges all played the course. The model—city-owned, architect-designed, nominally open to anyone—became the seed of an entirely different American game from the private club tradition that had founded the USGA.

Municipal courses spread through the major cities in the two decades after Van Cortlandt. Chicago opened Jackson Park in 1899; Boston followed with Franklin Park (where the public-course pioneer George Wright laid out holes as early as 1890) and George Wright Golf Course; Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and San Francisco all built municipal facilities before 1920. There were 742 golf courses in the U.S. before World War I; five years after the war the number had tripled, and by 1929 it had increased nearly eightfold. The 1913 Ouimet effect drove most of that growth, and a new category emerged alongside the muni: the daily-fee course, privately owned but open to anyone with greens fees in hand. Tom Bendelow, the Scottish-born "Johnny Appleseed of American golf," laid out something like 600 courses across the country, many of them daily-fee or low-budget public layouts on the urban fringe. Black golfers in northern cities—barred from most private clubs and many southern public ones—built their own institutions: the United Golfers Association, founded in 1925, ran a Black professional and amateur circuit on the public courses where members could play, and produced players like Charlie Sifford, Bill Spiller, Ted Rhodes, and the amateur champion Joe Louis. New York's municipal courses became important precisely because, as one history notes, they were open to all residents, meaning Jewish and African American golfers had access at a time when formal and informal patterns of segregation and discrimination were not limited to the South.

The Depression became, paradoxically, public golf's greatest building boom. The Works Progress Administration funded public-course construction as labor-intensive, low-materials make-work that produced lasting civic assets. In early 1936 the WPA announced it intended to finance the building or improvement of 600 courses, and had already begun work on 306 at a cost of nearly $10 million. The signature project was Bethpage State Park on Long Island, conceived by Robert Moses, the Long Island parks commissioner, who acquired 1,368 acres including the former Lenox Hills Country Club in 1932 and envisioned a premier public golf destination emphasizing accessibility for working-class New Yorkers. A. W. Tillinghast—the architect of Winged Foot, Baltusrol Lower, and Bethpage Black's private-club peers—was hired with park superintendent Joseph Burbeck to lay out four new courses on the property. When the Black Course opened in 1936, weekday play cost $1, weekends $2, and a weekday season pass $15. It was marketed as "the People's Country Club" and remains the only municipal course ever to host a U.S. Open (2002 and 2009) and PGA Championship (2019). The WPA also built or improved Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia, Keller in Minnesota, Bobby Jones in Atlanta, and several courses at Ohio State, plus Southern Hills's bones; by 1942 the federal government had funded golf course work in nearly every state.

The postwar period was the second great wave. Between 1950 and 1969, roughly six thousand new courses opened across the United States, doubling the national inventory. Dwight Eisenhower in the White House made golf into an explicit signal of middle-class arrival; the interstates and the automobile made suburban daily-fee courses viable; television (Arnold Palmer's 1958 Masters, the Wonderful World of Golf series) drove participation. The 1950s and 60s were also the decisive period for desegregation. Municipal courses were a natural test case because they sat on public land and used public funds, which made the legal logic of Brown v. Board of Education directly applicable. Holmes v. City of Atlanta (1955) was a per curiam Supreme Court order that summarily reversed an order permitting the City of Atlanta to allocate a municipal golf course to different races on different days; combined with the companion Baltimore parks case, it forced public courses across the South to integrate. Holmes was the first case applying the Brown decision to other facilities and made it clear that the logic of Brown applied to other public facilities. On Christmas Eve 1955, Tup Holmes, his brother Oliver, and Charles Bell teed off at Atlanta's North Fulton course; the pro greeted them with "Fellows, we are glad you are here," and Holmes shot 36 on the front. Private clubs took much longer—the PGA of America's "Caucasians only" clause stood until 1961, Augusta National did not admit its first Black member until 1990—but the public infrastructure had been legally pried open a generation earlier.

The 1960s through 1990s extended the public model in two directions. At the everyday end, real-estate-driven daily-fee courses became the standard suburban amenity: a developer built houses around a golf course because the lots adjacent to fairways sold at a premium, and the course operated as a public daily-fee facility paying for itself on greens fees and dues. Architects like Robert Trent Jones Sr., his sons Rees and Robert Jr., Pete Dye, Tom Fazio, and Jack Nicklaus designed hundreds of these. At the high end, an entirely new category emerged in the 1980s and 90s—the public-access premium destination—that aspired to compete with the best private clubs on quality while remaining open to anyone who could pay the greens fee: Pebble Beach had always been semi-public (it had been built that way by Samuel Morse in 1919, an unusual decision at the time), but it was joined by Pinehurst No. 2, TPC Sawgrass (1981), Whistling Straits (1998), and most consequentially Bandon Dunes (1999) and its sister courses on the Oregon coast, which proved that a remote, expensive, walking-only, Scottish-style public resort could become one of the top-ranked destinations in American golf. By 2005 the United States had about 16,000 golf courses, of which roughly three-quarters were public or semi-private—a complete inversion of the late-19th-century ratio. The market has contracted since: course closures have outnumbered openings every year since 2006, and the country has lost something like 1,500 courses, almost all of them mid-tier public and daily-fee operations squeezed between municipals on one side and destination resorts on the other. But the basic structure that Van Cortlandt accidentally inaugurated in 1895—that you can show up at most American golf courses without belonging to anything, pay a greens fee, and play—is what made golf in the United States genuinely different from, and several orders of magnitude larger than, its parent game in Britain.