Town Rankings / Pennsylvania

The Best Golf Courses in Philadelphia

Philadelphia's great golf mostly lives outside the city line, in the suburbs that fill the national rankings. This list is not that golf. These are the courses inside Philadelphia itself, and they are municipal: public, affordable, a little worn in places, and carrying more real history than most of the manicured private clubs that surround the city. A 1916 muni where Charlie Sifford played is not a footnote to Philadelphia golf. In the ways that matter most, it is Philadelphia golf.

Four city courses make the bench, and the ranking scores the golf first, then the day, then access. Access is where this list beats every suburban list in the region, because anybody can play these courses. The golf at the top needs no help from that argument. It has its own.

1Cobbs Creek Golf Course

Cobbs Creek opened in 1916 on the city's western edge, and for decades it was one of the most important public courses in America for a reason that had nothing to do with architecture. Cobbs Creek welcomed Black golfers when much of the game, public and private, would not. Charlie Sifford, who later broke the PGA Tour's colour line, played here. So did generations of Philadelphia golfers who were shut out of the clubs whose courses fill the glossy rankings. That is not a sidebar to this course's case for No. 1. It is the centre of it.

The golf underneath the history is genuine, too: a classic-era layout over rolling creek ground that gave good players a real test long before restorations were fashionable. Gil Hanse's team has restored Cobbs Creek in recent years, work aimed at returning the course to its early form while rebuilding it as a modern public facility, with the history treated as the asset it is rather than a plaque by the first tee.

The concession is that Cobbs Creek has lived a hard municipal life, with years of deferred maintenance and a clubhouse fire in its recent past, and the restored version is still proving itself season by season. Restorations are promises until conditioning holds through a wet spring. Even grading on the curve of that caveat, this is the No. 1 course in Philadelphia, and it is not particularly close.

2Walnut Lane Golf Club

Walnut Lane, in Roxborough, is the smallest serious course on this list: short, tight, and built for learning the game as much as playing it. It has long served as a home for junior golf and first swings in the city, and its scale is the point. A beginner can get around Walnut Lane. A good player still has to hit it straight, because there is nowhere to miss.

Second place for a course this short needs explaining, so here it is: the ranking rewards the day and access after the golf itself, and few courses anywhere give a city more golf per acre than this one. The concession is length and ceiling. Walnut Lane will never test a strong player's long game, because there is barely room to ask the question. What it tests, it tests well.

3Juniata Golf Club

Juniata is a compact city course in the Frankford section, golf folded into a working neighbourhood, with the elevated rail lines and rowhouses never quite out of the picture. That is not a complaint. Urban golf has its own character, and Juniata's is unpretentious in the best way: cheap, quick, and played by people who fit a round into a life rather than building a day around it.

It ranks third because its test is the most modest of the three courses above the bottom line, a notch below Walnut Lane's tidy precision and well below Cobbs Creek in every category. On a pure value basis, an argument exists to flip it higher. We score golf first, so it sits here, holding down the middle of a list that gets more honest the further down it goes.

4FDR Golf Club

FDR Golf Club occupies flat ground in the big park at the city's southern end, near the stadiums, and it has always been the most forgiving golf on this list: wide, flat, hard to lose a ball on, and suited to the high handicapper and the nine-hole evening round. Every city needs one course where a new golfer can play badly without misery, and in Philadelphia that job fell to FDR.

Fourth is fourth, though. The ground gives the design little to work with and the course makes few demands that a player remembers on the drive home. Philadelphia's list closes on its flattest fairways, in the shadow of the ballparks, where the city's golf is at its plainest and, for the golfer playing his third round ever, exactly right.