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Article Excerpt
Few sports leave an imprint on the land as large or distinctive as golf. Golf courses are highly visible from the air and are easily distinguishable in remotely sensed satellite imagery because of their large size, distinctive patterns, and normally bright green, irrigated grasslands. Golf is the eleventh most popular sport in the United States, and during the last quarter of the twentieth century the number of golfers increased four times faster than the nation's population, from 10 million to more than 25 million. These golfers played nearly 600 million rounds annually (U.S. Census Bureau 2002).
Golf courses are an important national land use. The nation's 16,000 golf courses occupy an area as large as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined (Santiago 2005). These golf courses represent a significant investment of public and private capital and land. Often, they are centerpieces of destination resorts and vacation areas and consequently have had impacts on vacation travel and retirement migration (R. L. A. Adams 1995).
Our objective in this article is to explore the changing geographical distribution of golf courses in the conterminous United States at the regional level using county data and to determine whether golf-course construction and distribution were influenced by some of the major socioeconomic driving forces of the twentieth century (Kates, Turner, and Clark 1990; Turner and Meyer 1994). In some ways, this study updates and expands on the work of Robert Adams and John Rooney (1985, 1995). We, however, focus more explicitly on golf courses as a significant land use that reflects the socioeconomic and environmental drivers of their construction epoch.
Using a database we purchased from its creator, Golf Magazine, we divided dates of golf-course construction into four growth epochs that generally correspond to major socioeconomic conditions of the time: Epoch I, urban, elite beginnings (1878-1919); Epoch II, growth and stagnation during turbulent times (1920-1949); Epoch III, increased leisure time and affluence (1950-1969); and Epoch IV, maturation and saturation (1970-2000) (Figure 1). Some of these epochs roughly correspond with urban and economic periods that have been recognized by other geographers. The beginning of Epoch II, for example, corresponds with the beginning of John Borchert's auto-air-amenity epoch and John Adams's recreational auto era (Borchert 1967; J. S. Adams 1970). The similarities of our epochs compared with those of Borchert and Adams are not surprising, for each of them attempted to do exactly what we attempt to do--discern patterns in recent U.S. land-use changes. Understanding the drivers of golf-course construction will be crucial to understanding the geography of golf and golf courses.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
EPOCH I, 1878-1919: URBAN, ELITE BEGINNINGS
Wealthy travelers brought golf from Scotland to the United States during the 1880s (Adams and Rooney 1985; Jackson 1985; Wyckoff 1990). In 1878, Saint Andrews, north of Yonkers, New York, became the first documented American golf club (Wind 1956; Betts 1974). Golf began as a sport for the social elite, who had the first golf courses constructed in the suburbs of eastern, coastal population and financial centers (Adams and Rooney 1985) (Figure 2). These first golf courses were predominantly private, and private courses outnumbered public courses until the 1960s (Fishman 1987). Golf also quickly became part of the athletic programs of socially elite universities such as Harvard and Yale (Adams and Rooney 1985,1995; Young 2002).
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
Scottish golf-course designers also came to the United States and replicated the course designs of their homelands (Bremer 1981; Adams and Rooney 1984). These courses were primitive, with minimal alterations to the existing landscape. The land used for the courses was minimized by golfers playing "around." The golfers played the first nine holes, turned around and played nine more holes that were alongside the first nine. This layout minimized the land used for the golf course and took full advantage of the natural lay of the land (Cornish and Whitten 1981; Adams and Rooney 1984). These courses were typically constructed at urban fringes, served the single purpose of providing a sports playing field, and left little or no room for housing or commercial developments.
Between 1879 and 1919, country clubs constructed most of the nation's 962 golf courses. (1) Regionally, golf emerged as a suburban sport because of its large land demands and also because it was adopted as a sport in the United States at a time when the elite were moving to urban edges (Wyckoff 1990). The result was suburban subdivisions with country clubs that included golf (Jackson 1985; R. L. A. Adams 1995). Sometimes the wealthy incorporated their subdivisions into "golf-club" villages to minimize sharing their tax base with the middle class (Higley 1995). Nationally, most courses were concentrated in the urban Northeast, with the greatest concentration in and around New York City. Boston, Massachusetts, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, became centers of secondary clusters of golf courses. Other golf regions included Chicago, Illinois, San Francisco, California, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Detroit, Michigan, and other major industrial and financial cities of the day.
A second pattern of golf courses focused on the amenity and second-home areas of the wealthy, which, in the days before air conditioning, were often located in coastal or mountainous areas (Wyckoff 1990; Aron 2005). These included the Bar Harbor-Mount Desert Island area of Maine, Cape Cod and Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts, Rhode Island Sound, Long Island and Long Island Sound, the Adirondack, Catskill, and White mountains of the Northeast, the east coast of Florida, and the west coast of Michigan. The Riverside County Club opened California's first golf course in 1891, and in 1897 the Del Monte, the oldest continually operating course west of the Mississippi, opened on California's Monterey Peninsula (Hotelling and Dost 1999). A third general region of golf paralleled the Erie Canal westward through the industrial heartland of the lower Great Lakes and the Midwest. To a large extent, the location of golf courses reflected the urban wealth and decision-making hierarchy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Borchert 1967).
EPOCH II, 1920-1949: GROWTH AND STAGNATION DURING TURBULENT TIMES
Golf-course construction reflected the exuberance and turbulence of society during the three decades following 1920. The Roaring Twenties are also known as the "Golden Age of Sport" (Rooney and Pillsbury 1992). Golf thrived during the economic boom of that decade, as did baseball, football, boxing, and horse racing (Dulles...
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