Boca Raton was a planned city of some 15,000 acres with access made possible by the extension of Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast railroad from West Palm Beach to Miami. With financial backing from sewing machine heir, Paris Singer, Addison Mizner set about to develop a resort city in the land of Spanish conquistadors, pirates, and Ponce de Leon. Mizner purchased the land and completed the Cloister Inn by 1926. A perfect storm of events doomed the project. The land bubble was beginning to burst in Florida, there was a railroad embargo, and a devastating hurricane. Mizner’s investors began to withdraw their financial support, and the property sale was approved by a bankruptcy referee. Clarence Geist, a wealthy Philadelphia utility tycoon, purchased the property for $71,500 and the assumption of $7,000,000 in debt. Geist maintained the resort throughout the Depression years, covering the insufficiencies on his own.
Geist hired William Flynn to design two courses and the Toomey and Flynn company to construct the courses with Robert “Red” Lawrence as construction foreman. Over the next two years, Geist invested more than $8,000,000 to expand the Cloister Inn and construct the golf courses. Grantland Rice profiled the North and South Courses in a March 1930 article in The American Golfer. Rice wrote,
“There are two courses at Boca Raton, the golfing products of H.C. Toomey and William S. Flynn, and they measure up to any standard you may care to set against them not only in the way of interesting golf but also in the way of playing conditions.
…Toomey and Flynn have handled more than one fine golf production, but nothing to surpass the work they have done here. For one thing they had eighty thousand car loads of clay and loam brought in and used to provide a better turf foundation for the fairway, where the touring golfer is not so inclined to play ‘the fluff’ shots which at first come from the attempt to take Florida turf. Several of the holes are reproductions of the best holes at Pine Valley, where Flynn did much of his work.
The South Course, which is somewhat harder than the North Course, has an unusual mixture of short holes, drive-and-pitch, full two-shotters and two of the best three-shot holes in golf. The seventeenth for example, around five hundred and seventy yards in length, is modelled (sic) after the famous long hole at Pine Valley, the seventh as I recall it, where the play demands a fine drive, an equally fine second and then an accurate pitch to a well-trapped green. No one can miss a shot and reach the green in par figures. The two-shot holes are all fine tests, calling for two wooden shots or a drive and a long iron where the ball must be placed. But in every instance the shorter player is given his chance to escape trouble, if he finds the range too much beyond his playing skill.
The South Course is around sixty-seven hundred yards in length, well trapped and well mounted to break up any impression of flatness, yet in the first round Armour (Tommy) turned in a 67 with a display of golf that was uncanny in its accuracy.
…The membership at Boca Raton, drawn from selected lists, has been coming along extremely well, in spite of the recent market upheaval which is said to have benefited very few in any financial way.
The addition of a nine-hole putting green and a short, well-trapped nine-hole course has rounded out the golf situation completely, and has set in motion one of the finest all around club projects in the country. The North Course, while not as difficult as the South Course, is still a high class test with an interesting layout that will provide the golfer with all the variety he can want. Complete accommodations for golf and swimming cover most of the winter needs.”
The federal government took control of the resort in 1942. The Army Air Corps used the facility to house officers for a radar training school. The golf courses were unmaintained throughout the remainder of World War II. The resort was sold numerous times after the War, with H. Wayne Huizenga purchasing the Boca Raton Resort and Club for $325,000,000 in 1997.
An Analysis of the Golf Architecture of Boca Raton South Course
Flynn courses are strongly strategic, yet they have a characteristic of hidden complexity. Flynn greens do not appear to be complicated and rarely contain overt internal contouring. While the South Course at Boca Raton no longer exists, the original architectural drawings and a series of photographs which, in combination with other archival material, help to make some informed assumptions as to how Flynn designed the details of this course. Comparable site designs, such as Atlantic City Country Club, Shinnecock Hills Golf Club and particularly Indian Creek Country Club, also in south Florida, offer us additional clues as to the finished architectural product.
This was a golf course where it seems Flynn was given free rein to design according to his own ideal without budgetary or ownership constraints. The land was generally very flat with a slight overall slope of about ten feet eastward to the ocean. Flynn used the sandy soil as his inspiration, creating large undulating sandy waste areas along with 162 bunkers throughout the course, some with islands of turf, others with indistinct boundaries. In many cases, the bunkers are oriented along the line of play. This is possible due to the flat ground, as the slightest undulations would hide the bunkers. Bunkers, which were placed into mounds, would have been flashed to the top lines with sand and would not need great size or longitudinal elongation. Many bunkers were raised along the rear profiles, hiding landing areas and distorting the distance perspective of objects behind the bunker toplines. Not all of the bunkers had formal outlines. Many, such as the great hazard area on the seventeenth hole, are drawn with stippled sand blending into the hash lines of the mounding. This precise language of Flynn’s drawings indicates a less distinctive hazard margin.
Other design themes included large greens, many in excess of 10,000 square feet. The larger targets may have been indicated by the strength of the prevailing winds in the area, which are from the northeast during the winter season. Flynn certainly took the wind into account in his plans for his Boca Raton North and South courses. We’ll look at this in depth in the hole-by-hole analysis. One merely has to look at the closing four holes, played into the prevailing winter winds to realize the effect wind has on his design.
The greens themselves reflected a theme in Flynn’s designs. There are rarely found large undulations but rather a complexity of slopes with a continuum of slope changes. These subtle greens are tied in naturally with the surrounding features. The overall effect belies the simplicity of outward appearances thus making reading putts, and thus making putts, more difficult than the golfer would expect. First time golfers observe typical Flynn greens and think they are easy to putt on. They are often mistaken. It may be that the golfer thinks it is his putting stroke that is off rather than realizing the subtle nature of the greens adds difficulty in and of themselves. The psychological effect of a golfer failing to meet expectations is one Flynn apparently understood very well. The “look easy, play hard” model Flynn employed contrasted with a “look hard, play easy” design model reveals interesting philosophical differences.
It is not the outlines of Flynn’s greens which promote strategy such as angular lobes on the corners of greens, which Donald Ross used to influence the ideal angle of approach. Flynn used bunker locations, greenside fall-offs and the complexities of slopes on the greens to indicate the preferred angles of play. These features are not as readily apparent and are one reason why Flynn’s courses take longer to figure out, even for advanced players. Pin locations tucked behind bunkers or near fall-offs add to the demands for better players aiming at peripheral pins.
Flynn’s plans called for the use of trees or vegetation to segregate the holes from each other, provided corridors of wind and enhanced angles of play and perception. On relatively flat ground, the use of trees also added to the colors and textures of golf course.
Holes of Note
Flynn created terrific examples of strategic design, variety and a sense of naturalness at the Boca Raton South Course. This was one of Flynn’s strongest designs and even at the original 6,628 yards and par 72; it would surely have withstood the all-important test of time. If the course existed today, it might well be considered the greatest course in Florida and one of the best in America. The sand flashed to the tops of the raised bunker lines would have appeared as whitecaps on a sea of green, in harmony with its surrounds. While the land was featureless with uninspiring topography, Flynn created contours in the fairways, raised greens, constructed mounding and natural looking sand waste areas and utilized trees and vegetation to enhance the perception of angles. The understanding of prevailing winter winds was factored into the design increasing the strategy of hazard placement and the green complexes. Lost to the war effort, yet easy to conceptualize, perhaps a study of this course will influence a future design on a similar site with ocean breezes and sandy soil.
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