Paramount Country Club
Designed by A. W. Tillinghast
History
There is a peculiar irony to Paramount Country Club’s timeline, one worth sitting with for a moment before the story even begins: A. W. Tillinghast, the man whose name would eventually grace the deed, had died in 1942, six years before the club opened its doors in New City in 1948. The routing and design work at Paramount trace to Tillinghast’s later career, part of the sprawling body of course work he left behind across the New York metropolitan area during a period when he was among the most sought-after architects in American golf. By the time the club welcomed its first members in Rockland County, Tillinghast’s name already carried the weight of Winged Foot, Baltusrol, and San Francisco Golf Club — a résumé that made Paramount, whatever its later profile, part of a lineage rather than an isolated commission.
The club itself emerged in the postwar years as private membership golf was reestablishing itself across the New York suburbs, offering Rockland County families a course of pedigree design within reach of the city. Tillinghast’s approach, shaped by decades of studying how golfers actually moved across a piece of ground, brought a disciplined routing sensibility to the property — the kind of structural intelligence that marked his later work even as trends in course design shifted around him.
Paramount has continued as a private club in New City in the decades since, maintaining its identity within the dense constellation of Tillinghast courses that ring the New York area. Its history is less about reinvention than continuity — a mid-century private club built on the foundation of a design legacy that was already, by 1948, considered part of American golf’s architectural canon.
Playing Notes
Expect a workout for your legs and your short game in equal measure at Paramount. The terrain rolls hard through this stretch of Rockland County, and you'll find few flat lies — take the cart unless you're in serious walking shape, and even then, be ready for some steep climbs between greens and tees. The bigger challenge is around the greens: many are elevated and firm, so approach shots that come in short or hot will run off into collection areas, leaving tricky up-and-downs. Ball-striking accuracy matters more than raw length here, since the sloped fairways can kick a good drive into rough if it doesn't hold the line. Bring extra patience for the greens themselves — they carry subtle breaks that are easy to misread on a first visit, so lag putting will save you strokes. Pack layers, too; the elevation changes and tree cover mean temperature and wind can shift noticeably as you move from hole to hole.