# The Best Golf Courses in Chicago Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-chicago-il/ [The Course Rankings](/) Town Rankings / Illinois A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Chicago golf, the famous part, mostly lives in the suburbs, behind gates in places with names like Lake Forest and Lemont. This ranking is about the city itself, the golf inside the limits, and that is a stranger and more interesting list: a Donald Ross private club on the South Side, a municipal course that a presidential library turned into a national argument, two sturdy public courses built near the lake's industrial edge, and a nine hole course under the downtown skyline where the green fee is measured in pocket money. The spread is the story. No other big American city asks one ranking to hold a Ross and a skyline nine and mean both. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and Chicago is the rare list where the bottom entry might give a visitor more joy per dollar than the top one. The order below is the order the golf demands. ## 1Beverly Country Club Beverly is a Donald Ross course on the South Side, in the city, which already makes it an outlier among Ross's famous work, most of which hides in suburbs and resort towns. Ross in Chicago means Ross dealing with flat prairie ground and making it interesting anyway, with the angled greens and run off areas that punish the lazy approach and reward the golfer who plays to a side. Beverly has been the South Side's serious club for generations of Chicago golf families, the kind of place where membership is inherited as much as bought. The concession is the gate, because it is always the gate. The best course inside the city limits is private, and most Chicago golfers will play their whole lives a few miles from it without seeing a hole. Estimates of initiation are not published and we will not invent one; the real price is the introduction. On the golf, though, there is no debate here. A genuine Ross, maintained as a championship members' course, outranks every public option in the city. ## 2Harborside International Golf Center Port Course Harborside is Chicago's public ambition made real: two full courses built on reclaimed land southeast of the city, near the lake and the Indiana line, with a links flavor, fescue, wind, and none of the trees that hide the rest of Midwest golf from the weather. The Port Course is the stronger of the two, the one that gets the visiting golfer's vote and the better tournament resume, a big, exposed test that plays differently every time the lake wind changes its mind. It ranks above its sibling and above the city's historic muni on examination. Harborside asks championship questions at a public price, the rarest combination in urban golf. The concession is the setting's honesty: reclaimed industrial land feels reclaimed, and the drive out is nobody's favorite part of the day. Golfers who need their courses pretty will dock it. Golfers who need them interesting will not. ## 3Jackson Park Golf Course Jackson Park is the most famous municipal course in America that most golfers have never played, because its fame is not about golf. The course sits in the park on the South Side lakefront where the Obama Presidential Center rose, a project that kept Jackson Park in the news for years and dragged a modest city course into arguments about land and legacy. Underneath the argument there is simply this: a full length public course on Lake Michigan, in a great park, open to everyone at city prices. Third is a ranking of the golf with respect for the setting. Jackson Park's design cannot stand next to Harborside's examination. What it has is place. Golf on the lakefront, with the skyline up the shore and generations of Chicagoans having played the same ground before you, is a civic experience disguised as a round. The concession runs toward its defenders, who think third undersells exactly that. On a list scored by the day rather than the golf, Jackson Park finishes second and pushes for first. ## 4Harborside International Golf Center Starboard Course The Starboard Course is the second Harborside eighteen, and being the second course at your own facility is a particular kind of fate. It shares the land, the wind, and the links idea with the Port, and loses the internal argument by smaller margins than the ranking gap suggests. Plenty of regulars prefer it on a given day, and a facility with two courses this close in quality is a public asset most cities would trade for. Fourth, then, as the slightly lesser of a strong pair. Starboard suffers by comparison with a sibling rather than by failure of its own. Put it alone in most American cities and it is the best public course in town. In Chicago it is the other Harborside, which is both an insult and a compliment, and mostly the second. ## 5Sydney R. Marovitz Golf Course Marovitz is a nine hole course on the lakefront in Lincoln Park, wedged between Lake Shore Drive and the water, with the downtown skyline standing over it like a gallery. It is short, it is busy, it is cheap, and it might be the most loved golf course in Chicago pound for pound. Commuters play it before work. Beginners learn on it within sight of the Hancock. The clock tower at the course is a piece of the city's furniture. Last on golf, obviously. Nine holes cannot outrank eighteens with Ross and championship pedigrees, and we will not pretend otherwise. But the value and access part of this ranking exists for places like Marovitz, and if the list were reordered by what a course gives its city, the little nine by the lake would be standing at the top waving. Chicago's real golf map runs from a Ross fairway on the South Side to a nine holer under the skyline, and the whole argument of the city is in between those two points. **Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.