If you live in New Jersey, as I do you, you needn’t be a golfer to have at least heard of Baltusrol Golf Club, in the same way that you needn’t be a music buff to have heard of Carnegie Hall or a corned beef aficionado to be familiar with Katz’s Delicatessen. The place is an institution: 130 years old; host site of 18 major championships; home to a 50,000-square-foot Tudor Revival-style clubhouse that ranks among the game’s most iconic structures. The club is so historic that in 2014 it was designated as a National Historic Landmark. All that’s missing from Balty’s c.v. is a Ken Burns film — and, who knows, maybe one’s coming.
Baltusrol has two excellent and challenging courses — the Lower and Upper, both of which were built by the legendary A.W. Tillinghast — which doesn’t make the club unique in this region of the country. The same can be said of Winged Foot (about 50 miles northeast); Westchester Country Club (not far from Winged Foot); Trump Bedminster (25 miles due west); and Philly Cricket (80 miles southwest); among others.
Here’s a fun wrinkle, though: the Balty membership gravitates not toward the higher ranked and more storied of the two courses (the Lower) but instead to the “other” option — the Upper. This isn’t to say that the club’s members aren’t proud of their more famous offering or that they don’t still enjoy testing their games out there; it’s just that if they’re sneaking out for a quick nine after work or playing a friendly Saturday-morning fourball, most members prefer to do so on the less bruising Upper.
That’s truer today than ever thanks to a recent restoration by restorers du jour Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, who also helped return the Lower course to its Tilly-rich roots by way of a restoration job they completed in 2021. “The Lower had gotten a lot of the architectural changes in the name of hosting championships,” Hanse said at an event for the Upper’s reopening I attended earlier this year. “The Upper was this kind of sleepy little golf course that sat up there.”
Sleepy but deeply beloved! Whereas the Lower daunts you with length and imposing hazards (like the Sahara bunker complex on the par-5 17th), the Upper delights you with more variety in hole settings and designs, on account of its home in the side of a mountainside. (It delighted me, anyway; my summer round at the Upper was my favorite round of 2025.) Working off a trove of archival photography and maps, Hanse and Wagner extended greens to their original dimensions and removed trees to open sight lines but never strayed from Tillinghast’s original intent.
When I asked Hanse if he ever feels like he and his team can improve on a classic architect’s intent (no one’s perfect, right?), he said, “Obviously we modernize golf courses, we move bunkers downrange, we move tees back, et cetera, et cetera. But trying to ascertain why [a designer] did something or, ‘Was that a mistake?’ — it’s something we really try to avoid doing because it just leads to other conclusions that might not produce the best results from a restoration standpoint.”
One of — if not the — most interesting questions Hanse and Wagner faced along the way came at the par-4 14th, where the club, in the run-up to playing host to the 1936 U.S. Open, had added a second green. The original putting surface, which sits on lower land, occasionally would flood when rainwater rushed down the hill, so the club installed the second green as a back-up. At some point in the late 1950s, the club gave up on the second green, and in the ensuing years it was lost to the sands . . . well, dirt of time.
So Hanse started digging.
“When Gil started to explore the right green, he was able to find remnants of that green because back in that time period, they did not deconstruct; they just plowed things,” Matt Wirths, Baltusrol’s president. told me last summer. “He was able to see the old stratifications of the green, and he was also able to see the dimensions.”
What to do? Hanse was torn. “First, we decided to abandon the non-original green, the upper one,” Hanse said. “When we found the original contours of the lower green, the upper green was about six to seven feet above it, and we thought, ‘Well, these can’t coexist. They can’t sit side by side the way they are right now.’”
But then Hanse asked his shaper to dig some more. “We’re going to blow it up anyway,” Hanse recalls thinking. “Let’s just get all the dirt out of the way and see if we can find the original grade. And we did. And then that’s what appeared. It came back to the two [greens] being able to sit side by side beautifully.”
Whether Hanse and the club would actually keep the old second green in play, though, remained an open question throughout the restoration; some members loved the idea while others were less enthralled, fearing it was too quirky or downright gimmicky.
The upper green, left, and lower green at the 14th present two different looks.
courtesy
One of the key deciding factors was that Tillinghast had an affinity for dual greens, so much so that he actually sketched out plans for a course in Atlanta in the 1920s with dual greens on every hole. Wirths said the Depression prevented the course from becoming a reality, but the plans alone were enough of an indicator that Tillinghast was more than OK with the unconventional design feature. “That was one more log to the fire of actually keeping both greens,” Wirths said.
And keep them the club did. When you play your second shot into 14 today, the challenge — depending on which green is in play — can look very different from one round to the next. It’s novel, it’s fun and it makes you wonder why the game ought to have more dual greens.
As for which surface is superior, the jury’s still out, which is fitting at a two-course club where members are used to making hard choices.
“I think we’re going to take a year to look at it and see how it plays,” Hanse said. “And then we can determine whether [the club swaps out greens] every other day or whether one green is more fitting for a championship than the other.”
