Only one club has hosted both the US Open and US Women’s Open on two courses.

Just 30 minutes west of Manhattan, Baltusrol Golf Club has in fact hosted nine US Opens, plus three PGA Championships and six US Amateurs.

Five of those were played between 1901 and 1915 on its original course, built on club founder Louis Keller’s land. In 1918, he hired AW Tillinghast to build a second course. The architect recommended a grander plan: plough over the original and embark on a golf construction project of a scale never seen before, the creation of ‘dual courses’ that would be equal in appeal and challenge, but with distinct characteristics.

Opening in 1922, the Upper and Lower courses have since become a staple of championship golf. While the pair have hosted both US Opens, over the years the Lower has become the preferred venue for the USGA and PGA, largely because its gently rolling landscape can better accommodate the spectators and infrastructure that now comes with major golf.

But for most golfers, the more undulating land of the Upper, and its more varied and memorable holes, may give it the edge, particularly now that architect Gil Hanse has completed its restoration.

Hanse was adamant that his firm would only agree to be retained by Baltusrol if the club desired to support a restorative approach to the golf courses. He is well placed to interpret Tillinghast’s intent, having completed projects at several of his other designs, including Winged Foot, Quaker Ridge and Ridgewood.

When asked the extent to which he would be prepared to ‘improve’ on the Golden Age architect’s original design, if he saw opportunity to do so, Hanse said: “It’s something we don’t allow ourselves to do. We really don’t. It’s a very slippery slope once you start guessing, or thinking that’s not quite right, or I would do this differently.” It is Tillinghast’s name that remains on the scorecards.

The closing fairway of the Upper course blends into its counterpart on the Lower (Photo: Evan Schiller)

That’s not to say there is no sign of Hanse’s hand at Baltusrol. Despite having an archive of over 5,000 items of material to reference, all of which survived a clubhouse fire in 2019, there are inevitably areas of both courses (Hanse also completed a restoration of the Lower, in 2021) where photography or documentation is somewhat open to interpretation. The club also needed to keep up with advances in club technology, which came through a combination of adding tees and shifting hazards further up the fairway.

The most obvious example of the latter is on the Lower course, where the Sahara bunker complex was moved 40 yards further up the fairway of the par-five seventeenth. This hazard, incidentally, has matured beautifully in the four years since it was rebuilt, menacingly enveloping the rolling fairway and a thrill to carry – as any of Tillinghast’s ‘Great Hazards’ should be – particularly if the previous shot was anything less-than-perfect.

The Lower course leans on imposing bunkering, like the Sahara and the cross bunkering on the second hole, to provide character. The Upper course, on the other hand, gets much of its identity from what members refer to as ‘the mountain’ that encloses the northwestern border of the property. The first four holes of the Lower play right along a ridgeline before the drive on the fifth carries players off the steepest part of the hillside to lower ground. The fourteenth climbs back towards the hill and the closing holes play along its lower slopes.

“The two courses feel like they belong on the same property but there are more characteristics on the Upper, I think, that are more responsive to the quality of the land because it’s a better site for golf,” says Hanse. “Tillinghast was willing to utilise slopes a little bit more predominantly for setting up strategies for holes – there’s so much cross slope on the first five holes that you’ve got to think about the placement of your ball more than almost anything on the Lower.

“Also, by benching those greens in, I don’t know if he realised this but probably he did, the difficulty of putting on the Upper is significantly higher than on the Lower, because your eye is picking up all these strong slopes and the greens might be doing something a little bit different.”

One notable achievement of Tillinghast’s design of those opening holes is how differently they play and unique their individual identities are, despite all traversing the same hillside. The first, a par five for members, rises gently and is a relatively warm introduction to the round. A strong par-four second is followed by a par three where the sensible choice may be to play short and allow the ball to roll onto the green. A huge dip between landing area and green is the defining characteristic of the fourth, while each of these opening holes have unique green contours that present their own puzzles that offer some fun and unexpected solutions.

There are two green complexes on the Upper course that Hanse says required a little more work than most. The first was at the short par-four ninth, where the tee shot plays over a lake and the green had previously been raised high above the original grade. “We were really struggling to find old photographs and historic documentation,” says Hanse. “We just knew it was lower, thankfully. As we dug out the green trying to figure out what elevation it should be, we hit a layer of the original green and it was like, eureka!”

On the fourteenth the challenge was more unusual. Tillinghast’s original green experienced drainage issues so another was built on slightly higher ground to the left, and the original was abandoned. “We were pretty much convinced that we were going to the build the original green site, to the right,” says Hanse. “When we shaped it, the relationship between it and the upper green on the left was really out of sync. So we thought, let’s just abandon the one that was built in the 30s. And then we came upon another set of old aerial photographs that showed the dual green existed a lot longer than we thought. We had thought that the original green was pretty much abandoned right away, but it lasted into the 50s.

“So we said let’s go and do our archaeology on the upper green. And we found that it had been raised when they abandoned the lower green. We found the original layer and it was down about two feet. When we pulled all that material off, the relationship between the two of them became much more balanced. It was clear from the old aerials that there were bunkers that were in use on both, they were jointly used. And we thought how do you have that bunkering work for both greens? But once the level of the left green came down, everything tied in.”

The result is a hole that will be regarded as one of the strongest on the property, and will provide a new challenge on each play.

With the original fourteenth green suffering from drainage issues, a second green was introduced in the 1930s. Hanse’s team discovered that they coexisted for longer than previously thought, so restored them both (Photo: Evan Schiller)

One highly significant aspect of the Upper course renovation has been the expansion of greens to their original sizes. Now, more pin positions have been restored, edges that were rounded are more squared-off, and at the rear of several greens additional ‘backboard’ has been reintroduced. This may keep more approach shots on the green, while also adding contour into play when putting.

Hanse says that work on the Upper course felt easier than the Lower. “I think it always goes smoother with the second go around,” says Hanse. “Everyone’s familiar with the methodology and what needs to occur. Ultimately, from a construction standpoint it was the same.”

He also explains that the character of the Upper course’s land means there is less reliance on large features to provide interest, and it had seen fewer alterations since Tillinghast’s original build. “From an architecture standpoint, the golf course had been changed less than the Lower. As I look back over the masterplan sheets we did, there was significantly less movement of bunkers. The golf course had already been stretched – we didn’t really add much yardage to it.”

This aerial image from the 1930s is remarkably similar to the course today (Image: Baltusrol Golf Club)

Returning golfers will be struck by the reduction in tree coverage across the Baltusrol site. The more open landscape provides all the usual agronomic benefits of air and light flow, opens up more views across the property and opportunities to interact with fellow golfers. It is also much more akin to the landscape of Tillinghast’s day. A comparison of historic and current aerial images shows remarkable similarity in tree coverage, as well as course features.

Infrastructure throughout has been updated – greens are now built to a USGA specification with PrecisionAire subsurface system, allowing the grounds crew to achieve Tillinghast’s intent for fast and firm play. Bunkers were rebuilt with Better Billy Bunker lining for ease of ongoing maintenance and a new Rain Bird irrigation system, designed by Paul Roche of Golf Water and installed by Landscapes Unlimited, gives the team enhanced control over the application of water to the course.

There is a plaque near the eighteenth green on the Upper course to mark the US National Park Service’s 2014 designation of Baltusrol Golf Club as a National Historic Landmark that describes the courses as “the seminal work of designer AW Tillinghast”. Only now can we see how well that work has stood the test of time.

This article first appeared in the July 2025 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.