Sharp Park is the one true Alister Mackenzie-designed seaside hyperlinks muni.
San Francisco Public Golf Alliance
It’s not straightforward being a California muni. Maintenance prices are excessive. Budgets are quick. And there’s strain to flip fairways into housing. Publicly owned programs make nice political punching baggage.
But of all of the battered munis within the Golden State, few have weathered extra blows than Sharp Park.
Built in 1932, Sharp Park was an exception from the beginning: a uncommon public-access design by the Golden Age grasp Alister Mackenzie, set alongside the ocean, simply south of San Francisco. Mackenzie himself described it “as sporty as the Old Course at St. Andrews and as picturesque a golf course as any in the world.”
In the Nineteen Forties, a number of of the unique holes had been misplaced to the development of a sea wall, and over time the wall has stored waves off the course. That doesn’t imply it’s held different threats at bay.
For a lot of the previous twenty years, Sharp Park turned the topic of a tangled authorized battle between environmentalists who sought to have the course closed and advocates preventing to protect it.
Foremost amongst these advocates has been the San Francisco Public Golf Alliance, a nonprofit whose mission is what its identify suggests: “to nurture and defend affordable, eco-friendly golf” within the San Francisco space. Since its founding in 2007, the Alliance has supported Sharp Park on a number of fronts. In addition to serving to put the lawsuits to mattress, it has propelled course clean-ups and capital enhancements. Earlier this 12 months, the group accomplished and put in within the Sharp Park clubhouse an historic exhibit targeted on Mackenzie and the course.
Ambitions for Sharp Park don’t finish there. Plans are within the works for a restoration by the architects Jay Blasi and Tom Doak that will draw on analysis by Peter Flory, whose digital imagery offered the blueprint for the current ballyhooed revival of the Lido, in Wisconsin.
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As standard, at Sharp Park, there’s tons occurring. And most of it prices cash.
Over the years, the Alliance has raised greater than $700,000 for the course by an annual scramble event, which can happen at Sharp Park on Nov. 12, and an annual public sale, which is already underway on-line. Many of the objects on the docket are appropriately Golden Age in pedigree. They embody rounds for threesomes and foursomes at architectural gems from coast to coast: Winged Foot, Camargo, Baltusrol, Somerset Hills, the Olympic Club, Monterey Peninsula Country Club, and extra.
Those programs aren’t munis, but when a muni is what you’re after, you too can bid on a tee time at Pacific Grove, the so-called Poor Man’s Pebble, in Monterey. The on-line part of the public sale will proceed by Wed. Nov. 8, after which resume as a reside silent public sale following the scramble event.
You can try the web public sale here, and be taught extra concerning the event at this link.
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