Town Rankings / Illinois

The Best Golf Courses in Glenview

Glenview is a North Shore suburb with an unusual golf inheritance: a naval air station. For most of the twentieth century the loudest thing in Glenview was Naval Air Station Glenview, jets over the rooftops, and when the Navy left, the village got its land back and had to decide what a town does with a runway's worth of open ground. Part of the answer was golf, twice over, because Glenview also holds one of the old private clubs of the Chicago golden age. Two courses, two centuries of golf thinking, one suburb.

The pairing makes this short ranking a real argument instead of a coronation. One course carries a U.S. Open in its past. The other carries a famous modern architect and a public tee sheet. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and the top spot turns on whether history you can verify beats quality you can actually play. We land where the evidence lands.

1North Shore Country Club

North Shore hosted a U.S. Open and a U.S. Amateur, and that sentence ends most arguments before they start. The 1933 U.S. Open here was won by Johnny Goodman, an amateur, one of the great upsets in the championship's long record, which means North Shore is not merely a club that hosted a major. It is a club where a major produced a story the game still tells. Courses that can hold a U.S. Open field and let an amateur win it are operating at a level of examination that suburban golf rarely reaches.

The club is private, old Chicago money private, and the concession writes itself: almost nobody reading this will ever play it, estimates of membership economics are unpublished and beside the point, and a ranking that put access first would flip this list without a second thought. We rank on the golf first, deliberately. A U.S. Open and a U.S. Amateur, on ground that has been testing Chicago's best players for a century, is a resume no public course in the suburbs can answer. North Shore is No. 1 in Glenview and it is not the close call the second entry wants it to be.

2The Glen Club

The Glen Club is what happened when Tom Fazio got the old naval air station: a full scale, high end public course built on land where jets used to park, complete with the kind of shaping, water, and drama that Fazio sells and that flat Illinois ground never provides on its own. It is the best public golf experience in this part of the North Shore, a course run like a private club for people who pay by the round, and it has held that position since it opened because nothing public nearby plays in its league.

Second here, and the write up owes it the real concession, which is that The Glen Club might be the more enjoyable day. It is certainly the more available one, and on conditioning and service it behaves like the private course it is ranked behind. What it cannot produce is 1933. Manufactured excellence is excellent, and Fazio manufactures it as well as anyone alive. North Shore's excellence was ratified by the USGA when Herbert Hoover was a recent memory. In a two course town, the old club with the major on its wall keeps the crown, and the air station masterpiece keeps the public's heart.

Glenview traded jets for fairways and got a U.S. Open club and a Fazio in the bargain. Most suburbs that lose a base get a mall.