Hilltop, in almost living almost color!

January 6, 2014Lost golf coursesJoe Bissen

Jim Bjork recently contacted me to pass along some golden nuggets about Hilltop Public Golf Links, the subject of Chapter 4, “Bang It Off the Tower,” in “Fore! Gone.”

Bjork’s personal connection to Minnesota is, one might say, thin. “I was conceived in Minnesota (ha!) but born in Illinois after Dad moved in 1954. I moved to Tennessee in 1985,” Bjork wrote as part of an email conversation.

But “Dad,” also known as Clifford Bjork, was intimately connected to Minnesota, and to Hilltop, the lost Columbia Heights golf course. Jim Bjork wrote that his father played in the old Hilltop Twilight League.

The photo atop this post is of Clifford and Maybeth Bjork (Maybeth was Clifford’s wife and Jim’s mother) enjoying a beverage on the Hilltop grounds. The photo is undated, but it certainly goes back a ways, considering Hilltop closed in 1946. (Update, 2/7/14: Jim Bjork said he believes the photo dates to 1940 or 1941.)

The Bjorks look dapper and classy, don’t they, in their golf attire? One small caveat: This might not be exactly what they looked like.

“Mom worked for a place called Pako,” wrote Jim Bjork, “which I believe did work on developing photos. Mom was one of those hired to ‘touch up and give color’ to black and white photos. She colored that picture I sent to you. How she did it I never did learn.”

The background of the photo of the Bjorks is as historically significant as the foreground is becoming. Jim Bjork also passed along a rescanned image of the background in the photo — it is the photo above. Makes you wonder if Hilltop wasn’t visible for miles around in the days it hosted golfers.

“HILLTOP GOLF LINKS (PUBLIC)” shouts the lettering on the clubhouse roof. Considering Hilltop’s perch on high ground in Columbia Heights — the clubhouse was near the intersection of 45th Avenue Northeast and Benjamin Street NE (on the south) and what is now Chatham Road (on the north) — it seems likely the rooftop advertising reached lower ground well to the south and west, to the southern parts of Columbia Heights and maybe even into northeast Minneapolis.

The building next to the clubhouse is interesting as well. I’m not sure whether it is part of the clubhouse or whether it is the manager’s residence, which was next to the clubhouse and still stands today, in the form of a house on the northeast corner of 45th and Chatham. The building in the photo and the modern-day house have similar structures but not identical, so I must say I’m puzzled.

By the way, if Clifford looks much at ease in the photo, it’s for two good reasons. One: “They truly loved each other very much!” Jim Bjork wrote of Clifford and Maybeth. And two: Clifford knew his way around a golf course.

“He once told me his biggest accomplishment in golf was that he played with and beat the Minnesota state amateur and the Minnesota state public links champion in the year they were the champion,” Jim Bjork wrote. “Who they were….where they played I never learned. Dad also caddied in the 1930 US Open at Interlachen. All I know about that is that he caddied for a local pro who did not make the cut.

“Dad was the only surviving child of Swedish immigrants. He grew up caddying…and working at a driving range. Golf was the only game he really ever knew and was interested in. It was the game that helped ‘Americanize’ him and he loved it very much.”

Additional update, 2/7/14: Jim Bjork passed along another photo (below) of his father; Mike Rak confirms that the photo was taken near the tee box of the 16th hole at Hilltop. The body of water is Highland Lake, also known as Peck’s Lake, which golfers had to play over a corner of.

In stock

December 26, 2013Lost golf coursesJoe Bissen

Seventeen months after the first interview — with the engaging, gracious and sharp-witted Mike Rak, who showed me all around Hilltop Public Golf Links in Columbia Heights and whetted my appetite for learning more about lost courses — we have a book in print. What a journey. Thanks, everyone, for the support.

Moving on … you might want to know where you can get the book. In addition to the online options mentioned at the end of this post, these fine bookstores, retail outlets and golf pro shops have it in stock:

— Balmoral Golf Course, Battle Lake
— The Bluffs at Coffee Mill, Wabasha
— The Bookcase, Wayzata
— The Book Shelf, Winona
— Common Good Books, St. Paul (Grand and Snelling)
— Eagle Valley Golf Course, Woodbury
— Edinburgh USA, Brooklyn Park
— Golf Headquarters, Rochester
— Golf USA, Eden Prairie
— Indian Hills Golf Club, Stillwater
— Lake Country Booksellers, White Bear Lake
— Lester Park Golf Course, Duluth
— Love From Minnesota, Roseville
— The Mane Tease, White Bear Lake
— Micawber’s Books, St. Paul (St. Anthony Park neighborhood)
— Minnesota History Center, St. Paul
— Northland Golf & Ski, La Crosse, Wis.
— Oak Marsh Golf Course, Oakdale
— The Ponds at Battle Creek Golf Course, Maplewood
— Pearl Street Books, La Crosse, Wis.
— Pine Creek Golf Course, La Crescent
— Roseville Cedarholm Golf Course
— Ross Himlie Photography, Rushford
— Rushford Foods, Rushford
— Southview Country Club, West St. Paul
— Stillwater Country Club
— SubText: A Bookstore, St. Paul (Selby and Western avenues)
— Valley Bookseller, Stillwater
— White Bear Lake Historical Society
— Winona County History Center

Please consider patronage of these businesses. I will be working to get the book stocked on additional store and pro-shop shelves in the coming weeks and will be updating the list when “Fore! Gone.” becomes available at other sites.

The book also is available through this website (just find a “click to order” button; the process is simple and safe), or on Amazon.com.

Was there a bunker in your back yard?

December 10, 2013Lost golf coursesJoe Bissen

There they are: Minnesota’s Lost Golf Courses. Click on the red type for a closer, interactive look.

Some background:

Five months ago, during one of my marathon sessions poking around on Google Maps, searching for this lost clubhouse or that lost water hazard or that farmer’s back 40 that used to be a back nine, I stumbled on a remarkable feature: Google makes it possible for visitors to create their own maps. Why, you could make a Google map of where family members live, two or three or five branches down the family tree; a Google map of all the golf courses you’ve played; or a Google map of, oh, I don’t know, the 20 most godawful truck stops in America you’ve visited.

My Google map, no surprise, just had to be of Minnesota’s Lost Golf Courses.

I spent about three hours that night creating the map, placing more than 80 “markers” in spots in Minnesota that correspond to sites of lost golf courses. For me, it was the kind of exercise I couldn’t stop with once I started. I love maps. I remember sketching out dozens of maps of states when I was a kid, and I even remember — this is a 45-years-overdue confession, Sister Martha Ann McGinnis, former principal of St. Mary’s Elementary School in Caledonia — once carefully drawing in an extra red-ink line on a map of South America that would cause the next owner of the textbook to unwittingly incorrectly answer a question about the railroads of Brazil.

But I digress. (I do that often.)

The Google map of Minnesota’s lost golf courses was made public a few months ago, though I didn’t advertise it. I’ll admit, I wanted to wait until closer to the release date of my book. Now that the book is a week away, maybe less, from being printed, I thought I would give folks an opportunity to see exactly where the lost golf courses I came across were situated.

Because Google’s mapping capabilities are so highly detailed, I was able to place most of the lost-course map markers within just a couple of hundred yards of the actual site of the lost course. If, for instance, you want to know where the old Hilltop Public Golf Links site was, you can zoom in just a little bit and see that it was in the northeastern corner of the city of Columbia Heights. Or you can zoom in really close and see the EXACT spot of the course — that house at the northeast corner of Chatham Road and 45th Avenue Northeast is the house of the former Hilltop course caretaker. The clubhouse was just across Chatham.

On the same map, you can see the Columbia Heights Ultrafiltration Plant, which the golf course wrapped around; Kordiak Park, which was the northern boundary of the course; and a Columbia Heights water tower, which occupies a spot right about where the 17th green used to be. If you really know what you’re looking for, you can even spot a brick “gatehouse” by the Ultrafiltration Plant that golfers used to bounce their balls off of, leading to really cheap pars. (More about that in the book.)

So … was there a bunker in your back yard? Or maybe your neighborhood, your city or your county? The map might tell you.

A few caveats:

— I wasn’t able to pinpoint the exact locations on about one-quarter of the lost courses mentioned in the book. For example, I can’t tell you exactly where Midiron Country Club in Mountain Iron was situated, so I had to settle for simply placing a marker on the city of Mountain Iron. If you go to the Web page with the map and look down the listing of courses in the left-hand menu, you’ll see designations that show which locations I can almost exactly identify and which are less precise.

— I can’t claim that these are ALL of the lost courses in Minnesota, any more than anyone could claim to make a map of, say, all of the sites of meteorite landings in Kazakhstan. I identified the courses that have some sort of verifiable proof of having existed. I know there are more. If you know of any, or know of any corrections to the map that I should make, I welcome your comments or a personal email to me at bissenjoe@gmail.com.

Enjoy!

Golf. In December. In Minnesota.

December 2, 2013Just plain old golfJoe Bissen

Breaking news? Hardly.

Plenty of us have played golf. In December. In Minnesota. Later than this. And in far more absurd conditions.

But December golf in Minnesota always is an entertaining novelty.

That’s Steve Rodriguez of St. Paul – you’ll never guess his nickname, but it’s Chi Chi – chipping back to a green (I’m pretty sure it’s the ninth) at Oak Marsh Golf Course in Oakdale earlier today. On any other day, Steve would have been going into his Chi Chi-sword-swinging routine on this shot, because he had just flown a wedge shot dead at the flagstick, hitting the green about 25 feet in front of the cup. Ball should have released and rolled to tap-in distance.

Except that greens in Minnesota tend to be just a bit firm in December. Steve’s shot bounced four feet in the air, as though he had landed it in the middle of the left lane of I-694, and scooted off the back of the frozen-hard green.

Steve laughed about it as he finished his round. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many people laugh while walking off the last green as the 30 or 40 hearty, stocking-capped souls who finished their rounds in the late afternoon today at Oak Marsh. The popular 18-hole course just north of the Woodbury border is, as usual, turning itself into Golf Central at the end of the Twin Cities golf season. Oak Marsh has been hosting up to 100 golfers daily, sometimes more, through late November and on into December. Club pro Steve Whillock is holding out hope of even a few more days of 2013 play. Seems like a good thing to me — the club takes in a few more dollars to help make up for a nightmarish spring season; the course, Whillock says, incurs little or no damage; and all these guys (I didn’t see a female while I was out there) seem to have a blast playing their final round (maybe) of the season in Minnesota.

Full disclosure here: I am partial to Mr. Whillock. He is a former teammate of mine on some strikingly mediocre Winona State teams of the late 1970s and early ’80s. To his credit, he got good at the game and carved out a successful career in it, including winning the Minnesota PGA Teaching Pro of the Year Award in 2003. Steve was a talented player even at WSU, but the talent of his that I remember best was his ability, as we rode in the school van up Highway 61, to scream at the top of his lungs at people out fishing or boating on the Mississippi River and to be heard, oh, I don’t know, it seemed like at least a half-mile away. Then he would slump back in his seat, the veins in his temple still throbbing from his screams, and say how much his head hurt. I suppose you had to be there, but it was humorous. Steve, allow me to embarrass myself, too. I believe my claim to road-trip fame on golf trips might have been my ability to stuff an entire moonpie from our sack lunches into my mouth.

Oh … I digress … back to Oak Marsh.

Steve Rodriguez was joined in today’s 35-degree heat wave (but there was no wind, so the cold was eminently tolerable) by Mike Petermeier of Woodbury and Bill Jahner of Somerset, Wis. None was entirely convinced he was playing his last round of the season up north — not even Jahner, in whose case it might be prudent to hang it up for the year knowing you scored that slick par on your final hole.

Nearby, Dan Chlebeck of Oakdale was one of the final five or six players on the course as twilight fell. From the right rough near the green on No. 18 — even with an uninvited visitor clicking a photo of him while in his backswing, a misdeed that would produce the Glare of Death from Tiger Woods — Chlebeck flipped this chip up to within 2 feet of the hole. He didn’t seem surprised. He said his long game isn’t so good, but he chips like that all the time.

Nice finish, Dan.

There’s no moral or lesson or really even a nugget of information in all this. Just thought I’d pass along a few observations on an end-of-days, for 2013 at least, afternoon at the golf course.

Another four bite the dust

November 26, 2013Lost golf coursesclosed golf courses, lost golf courses, Minnesota golfJoe Bissen

This post is back under its original title, with some editorial commentary included. The list of lost courses since 2000 can now be found at this link: Minnesota’s lost courses since 2000: The list.

“Modern” lost golf courses aren’t really my strong suit. My focus the past four years and in writing “Fore! Gone.” has been to find courses that were abandoned before the year 2000 arrived. The final curtain, using that parameter, belonged to Rich Acres in Richfield, which witnessed its last four-putt in December 1999 before turning into an airport runway. (And don’t try to catch me with a technicality over when the millennium ended. That has been debated for years, with no definitive answer evident. I’m going with Dec. 31, 1999, as the end of the millennium, whether anyone likes it or not.)

Since then, dozens of Minnesota golf courses have gone the way of dinosaurs. It has been part of a nationwide phenomenon. Golf chugged along in terms of popularity and new-course construction for years, with a particularly strong head of steam in the early 1990s, and without regard to a minority of voices who were sounding warnings of declining participation. It was a supply-and-demand phenomenon. The supply curve was going up; the demand curve was going down; and far too many golf-course developers didn’t anticipate that the twain would unhappily meet. That happened in about 2000, and courses soon began closing.

Since then, the naysayers have ruled. “Golf courses are losing money.” (Yes, many of them are. No arguing that point. And an underreported minority are doing fine.) “Golf takes too long, and it’s too expensive.” (In many cases, true and true. In others, not so much.) “Golf is too hard.” (What, you want me to walk your ball up the fairway another hundred yards, past the bunker fronting the green? It’s not supposed to be easy. That’s part of the game’s often-maddening beauty.) “Golf is dying.” (Give me a break. Every person who types that phrase will die before golf will.)

OK, I’ll shut up and resume the original post from autumn 2013.

Say goodbye to:

Hudson Golf Club: Just across the St. Croix River and the Minnesota border in the Wisconsin city of Hudson, this was the city’s private course for many years. It was established in 1955. It was bought in early 2010 by Hanson Brothers Golf, which also owns and operates River Falls Golf Club, but the Hansons shut down Hudson GC during the 2013 season, saying it wasn’t economically viable. Plans are to turn it into commercial development. Predictably, there is controversy in Hudson over the fate of the site — not so much that the golf course is gone as over what it will become.

Looking at the place only from its perimeters — the property is now posted with dozens of “no trespassing” signs — it looked like a very good golf course site, with elevation changes, water and a variety of trees. The photo above is, I believe, of the course’s southwesternmost hole. No, I didn’t trespass. I took it from a high point of a store parking lot that backs up to the property.

———————————————————————————

Parkview: A cruel joke, or did somebody in Eagan press some mysterious rewind button?

In the early 2000s, a variety of parties in Eagan argued over the fate of Carriage Hills Golf Course, a shortish, 18-hole, public layout that, the owners said, had become unprofitable. Some wanted the course to remain open, some wanted the course to become green space, and some — primarily the course owners — wanted to develop the land. The course closed in 2005, and the accompanying heated debate went all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court. Ultimately, the land became residential development.

Parkview became Carriage Hills Redux: Same city, similar-style course (18 holes, public, par 63), same scenario (a money-losing proposition for the owners) and same arguments (stay open, go green or plow it under and build homes). The battle was perhaps a bit less contentious than the Carriage Hills battle, but it still stirred emotion. Parkview, which opened in 1966, stayed open for part of the 2013 season before closing.

Incidentally, this three-way tug-of-war between owners, green-space boosters and golfers with emotional ties to the embattled courses is nothing new in Minnesota. Fifty years ago, the same happened in St. Louis Park, as Westwood Hills Golf Course lived out its final days. That course’s remarkable history is covered at length in “Fore! Gone.”

The photo atop this post is from when Parkview was operational. It was contributed by a woman who lives in a home adjacent to the former course. I visited there briefly last week, during a light snowfall, and took the photo just above (click any of these photos for closer looks), while land-movers were razing all evidence of tees and greens and cul-de-sacking away. Incidentally, the aforementioned woman was chagrined — not upset, I wouldn’t say, but chagrined — that her home will be closer to a new home than any other in the neighborhood. The houses will lie 105 feet from each other; zoning laws, she said, require a 100-foot separation.

More background on Parkview can be found in this St. Paul Pioneer Press story: http://www.twincities.com/ci_23143189/eagan-parkview-golf-club-will-reopen-shorter-season

——————————————————————-

Red Oak and Lakeview: The former, a nine-hole course, served golfers in the Mound and Lake Minnetonka areas for 58 years. The latter, an 18-hole layout just 500 yards away, lived to be 45. Both courses were owned by the Wenkstern family. Neither will be open for tee times in 2014.

A tribute to Red Oak and Lakeview can be read at The Laker and The Pioneer website:

http://lakerpioneer.com/2013/08/19/lakeview-and-red-oak-golf-courses-sold-to-developer/