Public golf in Baton Rouge is under siege.
In May, LSU closed its on-campus golf course that had existed in various versions since 1961. Now, City Park golf course, a century-old fixture in the heart of the city, is being targeted.
Some proponents want to do away with the golf course completely or at the very least — as part of a prospective redevelopment plan commissioned by BREC — alter the course’s footprint by repurposing some of the land it sits upon.
The issue has been a contentious one, as evidenced by this past week’s packed and tense public hearing at the nearby McKinley High Alumni Center.
Supporters of maintaining City Park golf course as is are well organized. They have a website, dominated the McKinley meeting Thursday, and have cranked out yard signs reading “Keep City Park Golf Course intact” that have bloomed across Baton Rouge like crepe myrtles as late spring turns to scorching summer.
If you are a regular reader of this column — ones on assorted topics are usually started with “Notes on a golf scorecard …” — you have no doubt figured out where I come down on this issue. I side wholeheartedly with the folks who want to keep the golf course intact.
Look, no one is going to drive across the bridge over City Park Lake on I-10 and mistake the nine somewhat scruffy holes hugging the nearby hills for Pebble Beach or TPC Sawgrass. They’re never going to host a U.S. Open there, as compared to venerated Shinnecock Hills in New York, which welcomes the national open this week for the sixth time.
Nonetheless, it is worthy of preserving as it is for numerous reasons.
History: The course was built in 1928 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. It was designed by Tom Bendelow, a Scottish-American golf course architect who laid out hundreds of courses in the game’s formative years in North America. Many of them were intended to be what City Park was and is: inexpensive to build and maintain.
Already altered: A 2007 remodeling already carved chunks out of the course. Holes No. 5 and 9 were reduced from par 4s to par 3s. It doesn’t need to be made shorter, further eroding the intent of Bendelow’s design.
Scarcity: If City Park golf course goes, nearby Webb Park will be the only public golf course within Baton Rouge’s city limits. With the LSU golf course’s demise, there are now only five publicly owned golf courses in East Baton Rouge Parish: Webb, Santa Maria, Beaver Creek and J.S. Clark, which, like City Park, is a nine-hole course.
At 154 acres, City-Brooks Community Park in Baton Rouge is not as roomy as City Park in New Orleans. That park is 8½ times bigger, and swallows up two 18-hole golf courses (there used to be four) with wide open spaces to spare. That City Park can offer many more options for recreational use.
Even though it is much more compact, Baton Rouge’s City Park already accommodates a pretty darned diverse bunch of uses. In addition to the golf course, there is a tennis facility, dog park, croquet lawn, a children’s museum, playground, swimming facility, paths for walking/cycling, fishing in City Park Lake and soccer and ball fields.
Do residents have rights to use the park for non-golf things? Absolutely. But the golfers deserve their place as well. City Park is a convenient and quick place to get in nine holes without having to trek to the edges of the parish to Santa Maria or Beaver Creek or deal with the crowds at heavily played Webb Park.
City Park, as I’m sure is the case for many Baton Rouge golfers, holds a sentimental place in my heart. It’s where my dad took me when I was first learning the game. It was where I made my first par with him beaming at me on the ninth green. Occasionally, dad admitted to picking up a ball that landed near the green on the eighth hole — it’s blind, uphill tee shot makes it one of the toughest par 3s in town — and place it in the cup.
If you ever made an ace on No. 8 back in the 1970s, not quite sure how the ball could have found the hole, I thought you deserved to know.
City Park’s rolling terrain is pretty hard to come by in golf land in this part of the country. Teeing off on No. 3, hitting over the railroad freight line that bisects the course toward the lake beyond, you can almost imagine you’re playing somewhere in coastal California.
City Park may not be everyone’s idea of a treasure, but it remains one for Baton Rouge nonetheless. Having long coexisted with the park’s growing list of other recreational uses, the golf course deserves to be preserved as it is.