A year ago this month, Forest Park opened its largest addition in recent years: 70 acres in the park’s southeast corner now known as the Highlands Golf & Tennis Center. In addition to the revamped course, the $5 million project unveiled several new amenities: clay tennis courts, a full-service restaurant and bar, and the only driving range within city limits. Yet the Highlands also offered a nod to the past; its very name references an amusement park that was at one time adjacent to the park.
The course’s legacy stretches back to the late 1890s, during the region’s earliest days of golf. The St. Louis Amateur Athletic Association—commonly known as Triple A—was founded in 1897 in the park’s northwest corner. Formed as a sports club, it originally hosted baseball, tennis, and track and field. At the time, golf was an afterthought. Over the next several years, the club added more holes; by 1901, it boasted the region’s first 18-hole course. With the World’s Fair quickly approaching, however, the city approached Triple A and negotiated a deal for another site in the southeast corner of the park, at a spot formerly called Tierny Hill. It provided just enough land for nine holes and several tennis courts. The course remained on that swath of land, virtually undisturbed, for the next 107 years.
By the turn of the 21st century, declining membership placed the club in jeopardy. Eagle Golf, operator of the 27-hole Norman K. Probstein Golf Course on Forest Park’s western half, acquired the club’s lease in 2008. It then hired golf-course architect Stan Gentry, who’d revamped the Probstein complex years earlier while largely preserving Scotsman Robert Foulis’ original design. Again, Gentry’s task was to consider the original routing—this time while adding a new driving range.
Surveying the land, Gentry was excited by what he found. “The original routing of the holes was outstanding. Foulis made excellent use of the natural topography,” he recalls. “You could take a number of these holes and put them on any number of area courses, and they would fit nicely.”
Among the redesign’s obstacles: dealing with two large swales carrying water from adjacent ball fields and land near the Jewel Box. To solve the problem, Gentry created new drainage running to the River des Peres. He then turned to placing the driving range, a new irrigation system, and improving the greens. The former “push-up” clay greens, built in 1902, had survived for decades, but were needed new subsurfaces and drainage; the revamped greens now dry much quicker after rain. Finally, Gentry re-imagined the final hole. “The one hole that did not fit the original character of the course was the ninth. Hitting around the hill like it did just did not fit with the rest of the holes,” he says. “The new par-3 finishing hole fits with the others better.”
Today, Gentry’s favorite holes are the first (originally No. 2) and the eighth (formerly No. 7). The latter is a sweeping dogleg to the left that carries down a hill, where the green is tucked into a corner. This course has created plenty of memories during the past century; its new incarnation is sure to create even more.
