Quaker Ridge Golf Club
Designed by A. W. Tillinghast
History
The story of Quaker Ridge begins in 1916, when a group of Westchester County golfers set out to establish a club of their own in Scarsdale, New York, then still a landscape of farmland and quiet estates within easy reach of Manhattan. They turned to A. W. Tillinghast, already building his reputation as one of the era’s most sought-after architects, to lay out the course that would bear the club’s name.
Tillinghast was in the early stretch of a career that would eventually include Winged Foot, Baltusrol, and San Francisco Golf Club, and Quaker Ridge came at a formative moment for him. He found in the rolling Westchester terrain a canvas suited to the strategic principles he was refining throughout the 1910s and 1920s, and the routing he produced established the club as a serious test almost from the outset — serious enough that Winged Foot’s members, building their own course just across the way a few years later, are said to have watched Quaker Ridge’s construction with keen interest.
Over the following decades the club maintained its course with a light hand, resisting the wholesale redesigns that reshaped many of Tillinghast’s other works. Quaker Ridge has hosted a number of significant amateur and professional events over the years, including the Walker Cup in 1997 and various USGA and MGA championships, cementing its place among the architect’s most respected surviving designs. Restoration work in more recent years, guided by attention to Tillinghast’s original intentions, has aimed to recover features that had softened or disappeared through decades of maintenance practices, keeping the course aligned with the character it held at its founding.
Playing Notes
Bring your best ball-striking, because the greens here are small and firmly guarded by bunkers that demand you land approach shots with real spin, not just distance. The terrain rolls enough to affect stance and lie on a good number of shots, so practice those in-between yardages before you arrive. This is a walking course by tradition, and the routing rewards it — the pace between holes is natural and the elevation changes are noticeable but not punishing. Off the tee, width is not the issue so much as angle: missing to the wrong side of a fairway will leave a tough look at flags tucked behind bunkers, so study the hole before committing to a line. The greens run quick and often slope subtly away from the approach, meaning a lot of shots that look safe on landing will release further than expected. Pack extra balls for the rough — it's thick enough in spots to cost you a full club on the next swing — and don't expect to overpower this course with length alone; controlling trajectory and spin will matter more than raw yardage off the tee.