Friday Fun: A History Lesson

Local golf courses that once were.

A bit of a different focus here as this post is usually a melange of unrelated things, but I was looking up something about a local course - Mill Valley Golf Club - and was struck by a sentence I saw online:

The course opened for play in 1919. The course was laid out by Dad Clark, a greenskeeper and professional golfer. His son, Bob Clark was the first professional employed by the club.

Membership grew in the 1920's to 140, far from the
projected total of 300. Virtually all of the memberships were
from Mill Valley as Belvedere and San Rafael each had a club
and course.

First, I love that there was someone whose “name” was “Dad.” History is hilarious sometimes. But for those who aren’t local to the Bay Area, you might not know why this is so odd. Because while Mill Valley GC still exists, and the San Rafael course is now Marin CC (though another nine-hole course existed where the current Civic Center is, which is also fascinating) … there’s no golf course in Belvedere.

In fact, if you know anything about Belvedere, it would be that it is seemingly the weirdest place to ever have a golf course. It’s a small ‘almost’ island - that’s connected to Tiburon via roads and a new man made lagoon, but it’s super hilly, and the roads are TINY. Most of them can’t handle two-way traffic which is always adventurous. Also, it’s an incredibly wealthy community. Per Wikipedia, it’s the eighth highest income community for those above 1,000 residents. Per Zillow, the average home price in Belvedere is $4,060,104, and there’s plenty that are absurdly higher than this. (I have one bookmarked that is listed for $39,000,000.)

But none of that used to be the case - instead, most of it was a golf course! Per this excellent article by Laurie Thompson, this article written in 1924 by Hay Chapman describes it:

The Belvedere Golf and Country Club, established in 1914, is unique. On the almost island, with Sausalito as its town, all the year round residents turn from the delights of the bay to a round of golf on this goat-climbing but interesting course. Many improvements have been made here in the last two years … The club is only eight miles from San Francisco by a delightful ferry trip.

As a certified golf sicko, I tend to bemoan the loss of a golf course, to think of the loss of the walk, the shots and the history. And when courses are razed to build housing, it’s usually not great housing stock but developments that are soulless, or perhaps low income housing units which serves a different purpose.

But has there ever been a better trade? There are approximately 1,100 “housing units” in Belvedere, which means if we believe both these figures, the housing stock alone is worth $4.46 BILLION. I suspect that when the golf course was torn down to sell the land for housing, whoever sold it got a good deal but …. probably left some money on the table.

Apparently, there’s more details (or at least photos) of this lost golf course in this book, available on Amazon and likely elsewhere. I admit, I’m curious.

Do you live near a spot that used to have a golf course, with a good story? It turns out I love this kind of thing. Pray, do tell.