Course Layouts through the years

In 1920, the renowned George O'Neill performs a redesign that launches the club and course into the national spotlight. You play today on a re-routed version of 9 holes of O'Neill's design. Several of the greens are original and are over 100 years in age.

For perspective, when the course is conceived in the first decade of the 20th century, all of Altadena has only a few hundred houses, 1200 people and one grocery store.

Pasadena, its more reserved and cosmopolitan neighbor to the south has tripled in size - growing from 9,000 in 1900 to 30,000 citizens in 1910. Theodore Roosevelt has just left office and Taft is the sitting president.

In the modern day and before the 2025 fire, Altadena alone had over 40,000 inhabitants.

In 1910, oil and compacted sand are the putting surfaces most common with very few west coast golfers rolling their gutta percha balls on mown grass. One of the earliest photographs of the course and revealing of the times it was born, shows players putting while spectators watch greenside, one of them mounted on a horse. This may be Charles Frederick Holder, founder of the Avalon Tuna Club on Catalina Island and the Valley Hunt Club of Pasadena.

Built on what was formerly the bed of a wash from an upstream Rubio Canyon, the property was strewn with boulders and cactus and coyotes. This fill having been placed there over the centuries made for what might be thought of as a gravelly base under the turf and the course has always drained well.

An opening day news journalist of the Los Angeles Times wrote "As the rains may fall on the foothills until noon the players can still head out a half hour later without ponding on the links."

Construction begins in 1910 and officially open for play in 1911. In the first rendition and birth of the course, William "Willie" Watson of Chicago, and St. Andrews, Scotland, finishing the original 18 hole layout in February 1911 for J. B. Coulston, president of the National Bank of Pasadena and owner of the Maryland Hotel, also in Pasadena.

Coulston headed a group of hotel men and other “local and eastern capitalists,” who formed a land association and bought 134 available acres below Mendocino and then incorporated the Altadena Country Club. The club's membership filled in quickly and the AGC prospered in its early years as nearby Annandale had no room for membership and play was heavy down in Pasadena at the hilltop Raymond Hotel.

At 6566 yards, the course was introduced to the public by a Los Angeles Times article in December of 1911, upon completion of the clubhouse. World war one will begin in 1914 and last until 1918 and the club finds most of their male membership involved in the conflict. The next and most glorious phase of the grounds at your feet comes at the beginning of the roaring 20's.

In 1920, J.B. Coulston and the California Hotel Company bought the Altadena Country Club, and planned $500,000 in improvements, with three eighteen-hole golf courses, and renamed it the Pasadena Golf Club. This is perhaps her shining moment as the course will be played by the very best amateurs and professionals of the day. The roaring twenties were indeed loud on the fairways and greens below Mt. Wilson and Mt. Lowe...

George O’Neil, a renowned designer of the times out of Chicago who had laid out Annandale Golf Club with Arthur Rigby, was hired to design the new courses. His assistant was Jack Croke, of Chicago’s Exmoor club and Croke implemented O'Neill's design on the new course with William P. Bell, who had previously been Caddiemaster and Ground Superintendent at Annandale Golf Club.  Bell would invent the travelling sprinkler, an innovation which allowed Southern California courses to be covered with grass year around. Bell's son would go on to design over half of the golf courses in southern california, quite a family legacy.

The first nine-holes of the new Pasadena Golf Club opened on October 31, 1920, and the second nine in December to an immediate sensation. It was the first golf course in Southern California with undulating grass greens. William P. Bell became Superintendent of Pasadena GC in 1921, and Bell and Jack Croke teamed up to rebuild the greens at Annandale in 1922, and also the fledgeling Rancho Golf Club on the west side in 1923. Like most private country clubs, the stock market crash and following great depression forced the Pasadena Golf Club into bankruptcy and foreclosure with a bank now owning the course.

The last and latest rendition of the course occurs when the county takes over the management of the course from 1950 to the present day. Currently, Courseco and their team is at the helm, keeping the course tidy and the greens running true to their hundred year old roots!