Course Layouts over the years and perspective

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 that design. Several of the greens are original and are over 100 years in age.

For perspective, when the course is conceived all of Altadena has only 1200 people spread across it in a few hundred houses and one grocery store.

Pasadena, its more reserved and cosmopolitan neighbor to the south has tripled in size in one decade, growing from 9,000 in 1900 to 30,000 citizens in 1910. Before the fire, Altadena alone had over 40,000 inhabitants.

Oil and compacted sand are the putting surfaces common at the time with very few west coast courses 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. "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, started designing 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 and earned back their investment. 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. They wrote "The first four holes are nice, and straight easy ones." These holes can be imagined today when standing on the putting green today and looking south.

They played current #5 today as their #1. Their #2 came back up the hill diagonally to the northwest with a green just to the right of where the large pine tree left of #4 fairway sits. Having finished, they would play back down the fairway of current hole #4 toward its tee and beyond to the current (and their) #3 green. They then played #4 from the south side the current #3 green up and left toward current #6 green and the practice area beyond...

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 named it the Pasadena Golf Club. This is the coming of age time period when the course will be played by the very best amateurs and professionals of the day. The roaring twenties were indeed loud in the foothills 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 layout 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.

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 at the new Rancho Golf Club in 1923.

The county would take over the supervision and course management from 1950 to present day. Currently, Benny is at the reins of managing the golf course overall and Fernando is the course superintendant at the helm.