Lost World

It is a sad fact of Los Angeles golfing life.

Despite a rich tradition, several world-famous clubs and a splendid year-round climate, there are simply not enough courses to meet the expansive needs of golfing Angelenos. Though the opening of several prominent facilities in Ventura, Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties has helped, golf in L.A. truly remains, by any definition, a “seller’s market.”

Of course, such scarcity hardly comes as news to those paying top dollar for club memberships or grazing through six-hour rounds at venerable Rancho Park. What might surprise these golfers, however, is that such deprivation was not always the case.

Not by a longshot.

For according to the 1931 edition of the highly reliable American Annual Golf Guide, Los Angeles County boasted a total of 14 first-rate 18-hole golf courses that no longer exist. That’s 14 full-sized layouts -- public and private -- that have dissolved into housing, airports, shopping malls and the like. Most of these courses were of real merit, several of the best being built by George Thomas and/or Billy Bell, the legendary architects responsible for such landmark courses as Riviera, Bel-Air and the Los Angeles Country Club.

What’s missing then, is an impressive body of work. Indeed, we can fairly say that a good number of prominent American cities have never had as many fine courses in total as the Los Angeles area has lost.

Though the competition would be close, we can tentatively select the original El Caballero Country Club in Tarzana as the standard-bearer for L.A.’s deceased courses -- largely on the strength of the great sportswriter Grantland Rice’s once referring to it as among the finest layouts on the West Coast.

Located in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains immediately north of today’s Braemar Country Club, El Caballero was a scenic private track designed primarily by Bell (with suggestions from Thomas) in 1926. Routed through parts of two large canyons, it measured a then-stout 6,588 yards and featured among its best holes a pair of famously diminutive par threes, the 144-yard fifth and the 115-yard 17th. At the former, a mid-iron generally was required to find an L-shaped green perched just above the canyon; the latter was notorious for its tiny, bunker-ringed putting surface.

Though the club was the site of the 1927 L.A. Open (won by Bobby Cruickshank), the economic pressures of World War II ultimately led to its demise. The current El Caballero Country Club sprung up on adjacent land in 1957.

A second departed Bell gem was the Royal Palms, a spectacular private course that briefly existed in the southwestern corner of San Pedro. The Royal Palms opened in 1927 as the planned centerpiece of a luxury development atop the towering cliffs at White Point. Measuring 6,334 yards (with a par of 70), it was routed over exceptionally hilly terrain and a pair of chasms. The most memorable hole was the 365-yard 14th, a downhill drive-and-pitch whose approach was played across a wide abyss spanned by a spectacular footbridge.

Not far behind, however, was the 442-yard 18th, a monstrous clifftop par four that probably was as difficult as any finishing hole in the country. One of many area Depression victims, the Royal Palms shut its golfing doors in 1933.

On the public side, the biggest losses surely were the East and West courses of Culver City’s Fox Hills Golf Club, mid-1920s creations adjacent to today’s Fox Hills Mall. These were two Thomas layouts befitting the finest of private clubs, with most holes routed through and around several mid-sized canyons.

Measuring nearly 7,000 yards when it was the site of the 1954 L.A. Open (won by Fred Wampler with a respectable score of 281) the East course had grown substantially from its 6,300-yard beginnings and was widely viewed as the better modern track. Curiously, the less-heralded West course (which began as the separate Baldwin Hills Golf Club) may have offered more truly first-class holes, especially its long and dangerous 225-yard 14th.

The West was never expanded over the decades, however, and measured only 6,440 yards at the time of the property’s 1960s development-related demise.

A shorter-lived facility of distinction lay northward, in the foothills above Altadena, where the private Pasadena Golf Club opened in 1920. Clearly the career-best design of its journeyman architects George O’Neil and Jack Croke, this 6,291-yard, par-70 layout bore a passing resemblance to New Jersey’s renowned Pine Valley in that its artificially irrigated fairways were surrounded primarily by native desert.

Pasadena GC featured several excellent holes including the dangerous 110-yard fifth, a tricky pitch played across a shallow ravine to a tiny, sand-surrounded green. Pasadena managed to weather the Depression better than many courses, but heavy rains in 1938 led to severe flooding and irreparable damage at the course.

The nine-hole Altadena Golf Course, which currently occupies part of the original site, is a different layout, built by Bell after World War II.

Not far to Pasadena’s west lay the sleeper among L.A. County’s lost courses, the original Flintridge Country Club. Located on a large tract partially occupied by today’s St. Francis and Flintridge high schools, this 6,410-yard layout was the centerpiece of a real estate development driven by U.S. Sen. Frank Flint. There is no known record of the designer, but the course was among the area’s best.

A narrow barranca (today’s concrete-walled Flint Canyon Channel) cut through the property and figured into play on six holes, especially at the 500-yard seventh, a sweeping dogleg right whose second shot dared one to carry a large stretch of the hazard. The barranca also fronted the green of the narrow, 370-yard eighth and the 175-yard 17th, the latter a tricky par three with trees overhanging the right side of the green. Flintridge lasted little more than two decades, ultimately riding the economic hardships of wartime into oblivion.

Many vintage West Side golfers can still recall the old California Country Club, a private 6,538-yard course just south of Rancho Park, in the neighborhood now known as Cheviot Hills. Limited evidence suggests either Bell or the eccentric Max Behr was the course’s designer, though the layout was surely better known for its steep terrain than any grand architectural pedigree.

Also noteworthy was the club’s Hollywood clientele, something we might assume was due to its studio-friendly location but, in reality, was more a product of nearby Bel-Air and Los Angeles Country Club’s initial refusal to admit showbiz types. Though not generally considered an elite layout, California did feature several memorable holes, including a pair of backbreaking par fives, the 560-yard ninth and 581-yard 16th. With their club sitting upon especially well-located real estate, the owners ultimately succumbed to temptation and sold out to developers near the end of the war.

Beyond those seven layouts, several additional courses established names for themselves before World War II.

For example:

On land partially occupied by today’s Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, the public Sunset Fields Golf Club featured 36 Bell-designed holes. Though not considered quite the equal of nearby Fox Hills, Sunset Fields was, nonetheless, an outstanding public facility.

In Monterey Park, just south of the 10 Freeway, Midwick Country Club was once considered the ritziest private club in Southern California. Its 6,309-yard, par-71 course (a Bell redesign) was one of the region’s best before being sold for post-War subdivision.

In Inglewood, the Inglewood Country Club occupied land that included the site of today’s Forum. Featuring a par-71 track of 6,328 yards, this public facility played host to the 1955 Los Angeles Open, won by Gene Littler with an eight-under-par total of 276.

On the site of today’s Rancho Park municipal course, there once was a 6,440-yard, par-70 track built in 1922 for the Ambassador Hotel by the great British designer Herbert Fowler (creator of Walton Heath and Cruden Bay, among others).

In Studio City, on land that encompasses the present Harvard-Westlake School, the 6,300-yard Hollywood Golf Club featured several holes climbing high into Coldwater Canyon.

In Redondo Beach, in the neighborhood known locally as the Hollywood Riviera, a 1911 design by pioneer architect Tom Bendelow occupied an enviable stretch of coastal land.

Los Angeles golfers have good reason to grumble about overcrowded conditions -- but also to daydream about how wonderful things might have been had so many wonderful courses not been relegated to the golfing slagheap.

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Daniel Wexler is the author of “The Missing Links: America’s Greatest Lost Golf Courses and Holes” and the upcoming “Lost Links: Forgotten Treasures of Golf’s Golden Age” (Clock Tower Press). He resides in El Segundo.