Some of the best courses in the country are identifiable by their clubhouses alone, and in a few instances - Winged Foot, Oakmont, Myopia Hunt, Ridgewood, and Shinnecock, to name but a few - they become iconic in their own right. No tour of Sleepy Hollow is complete without at least a brief discussion of its magnificent clubhouse. While the property has been owned by Colonel Eliot Shepard and William Rockefeller, and the course has been worked on by some of the great architects in golf, including Tillinghast and Hanse, Sleepy Hollow today stands clearly as a shining example of CB Macdonald’s design tenets and as a fitting monument to George Bahto. In its present form, the main course at Sleepy Hollow is rife with beautiful interpretations of many of the Macdonald templates, including Redan, Punchbowl, Double Plateau, and one of the most gorgeous Shorts this side of Fishers Island. George Bahto and Gil Hanse were brought in to restore the course’s rightful Macdonald heritage. Via the passage of time and the intrusion of several interim architects of more modern vintage, the course lost touch with its golden age roots for a period. In the late 1920s, AW Tillinghast expanded the course to 27 holes, creating several new holes for the 18-hole “Upper” and 9-hole “Lower” courses. Macdonald designed the golf course, with Seth Raynor on the ground as engineer, and the original 18 holes were completed that same year. Sleepy Hollow was built on the 338-acre Woodlea estate, which the club acquired in 1911. The photographs you see below were taken over the course of two visits to Sleepy Hollow (which is the reason for the differences in light, course conditions and pin positions). The “lesser” of the par-3s at Sleepy Hollow As with my tour of Old Town Club, Sleepy Hollow’s recent near miss on Golf Digest’s Top-100 list provided a perfect impetus and incentive to pull this tour together and shine a bit of a light on a place that, for me, is ranked about 100 spots too low. 15th and 16th GreensĪnd of course, I’ve been wanting to do a photo tour of Sleepy Hollow for quite some time. And to top it off, Sleepy Hollow is the course that sparked my interest in the work Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor, and subsequently my love for golf architecture generally.
Exceptional golden age architecture, spectacular views, exciting shots, fabulous conditions - Sleepy Hollow has everything a golfer could want. Sleepy Hollow is, quite simply, one of my favorite places in the country to play golf.
Tillinghastįull disclosure: I love this place. SLEEPY HOLLOW COUNTRY CLUB – A COURSE TOUR & APPRECIATION
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