Town Rankings / Pennsylvania

The Best Golf Courses in Fox Chapel

Fox Chapel is a borough of big houses, old trees, and very little commerce, tucked into the hills above the Allegheny River northeast of Pittsburgh. It has no downtown to speak of. What it has, improbably, is one of the finest Seth Raynor courses in America and another old Pittsburgh club a few minutes away, which makes this quiet suburb the centre of western Pennsylvania golf whether it wants to be or not.

Both anchors are private, both are old, and both play over the kind of rolling, wooded ground that defines golf in this part of the state: uphill approaches, sidehill lies, greens set into slopes. The ranking rewards the golf first. That is fortunate for the course at the top, because its golf is the argument, the evidence, and the verdict all at once.

1Fox Chapel Golf Club

Fox Chapel Golf Club is Seth Raynor's Pittsburgh masterpiece, and the word masterpiece gets used carefully on this site. Raynor built template holes, taking the great holes of Britain and rebuilding their ideas on American ground, and Fox Chapel has the full vocabulary spoken fluently. There is a Biarritz, with its long green split by a swale that turns a good long iron into a negotiation. There is a Redan, angled and tilted, asking for a shot shaped into the slope rather than fired at the flag. Golfers who study architecture make pilgrimages for holes like these. Golfers who do not study it just know the holes feel different, more deliberate, like every bunker and contour was put there to make a point.

The setting does the rest of the work. The course moves through the Allegheny hills with the confidence of a layout that never had to manufacture interest. Raynor did not need to. The ground gave him elevation, the templates gave him strategy, and the combination produced a course that architecture people rank among the best in the country while Pittsburgh keeps it mostly to itself.

The concession: Raynor's templates are a language, and not every golfer wants to learn a language on a Saturday morning. If you prefer your golf modern, long, and obvious, Fox Chapel will feel like a riddle. It is also, of course, private, and firmly so. Neither point dents the ranking. This is the best course in Fox Chapel and the standard every other course in the region gets measured against.

2Pittsburgh Field Club

Pittsburgh Field Club is the other half of the borough's golf, an old club with a traditional parkland course that has served Pittsburgh's golf establishment for generations. Where Fox Chapel is a seminar in template architecture, the Field Club is a members' course in the classic sense: tree-lined, walkable, exact about the shots it asks for, and known intimately by the people who play it every week. Local knowledge is worth more here than at most places. The regulars can tell you where every putt breaks, and they are usually right.

Second place needs a concession of its own, so here it is plainly: the Field Club does not have Raynor, does not have a Biarritz, and does not appear on national lists. If this ranking were about fame, it would not be close. But the Field Club's golf is honest, well kept, and harder than first impressions suggest, and in a two-course town it holds its end up.

Fox Chapel, then, is a borough with no main street and two golf clubs, one of which happens to be a Raynor that players cross state lines hoping to see. The mail gets delivered, the hills stay green, and the Biarritz waits at the top of the slope for the next long iron to come skidding through its swale.