Town Rankings / Pennsylvania

The Best Golf Courses in Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh's famous golf, Oakmont and the rest, sits outside the city line, and we rank those towns on their own pages. Inside Pittsburgh, golf means park golf. The city and the county run courses in their big parks, the ground is steep enough to be interesting almost everywhere, and the price of a round has stayed within reach of the people who live here. In a city built on hills and ravines, even the municipal golf comes with elevation changes most flatland munis would pay for.

Three park courses make the list. None of them will host a major, and the ranking does not ask them to. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and on access this trio is as strong as any list in Pennsylvania. The argument at the top is between character and size, which is a Pittsburgh argument if there ever was one.

1Bob O'Connor Golf Course

The Bob O'Connor Golf Course in Schenley Park dates to 1897, which makes it older than most of the clubs that get written about in this state. It sits in the park between Oakland's universities and the city's east end neighbourhoods, draped over ravines that the routing uses with an old designer's thrift. Nothing here is long. Almost nothing here is flat. A course built in the 1890s assumed golfers walked and thought their way around, and the Bob, as Pittsburgh calls it, still rewards the second of those far more than raw distance.

That character is why it wins. South Park and North Park below it are fuller-size tests, and honest cases exist for either on pure golf. But no other public course in the city gives you golf from the game's first American generation, played over ground this dramatic, a few minutes from a university campus. Rounds here are a cross-section of Pittsburgh: students, retirees, league players, beginners, all sharing the same sidehill lies.

The concession is conditioning and scale. This is a city course with city resources, the layout is short by modern standards, and a strong player will run out of club decisions before he runs out of holes. We accept that trade at No. 1 because what the Bob lacks in length it repays in texture, history, and sheer Pittsburgh-ness. It is the city's golf in its oldest and most concentrated form.

2South Park Golf Course

South Park is the county's big-park golf in the southern suburbs of the park system: a full-size eighteen in a vast county park, more conventional in its demands than the Bob and broader in its fairways. For the Pittsburgh public golfer who wants a complete round, proper par fours, room to hit driver, and a scorecard that adds up the way scorecards are supposed to, South Park is usually the answer. It is the workhorse course of this list.

Its concession is distinction. South Park plays the kind of parkland golf that a dozen Pennsylvania towns can offer, competently and pleasantly, without a hole or a stretch that belongs to it alone. Against a short field, competence plus scale earns second place comfortably. Against the Bob's 1897 character, it was never going to win, and the players who fill its tee sheet do not seem to care in the slightest.

3North Park Golf Course

North Park gives the county's northern half the same deal South Park gives the south: eighteen holes in a big county park, around the lake country north of the city, at a price that keeps local golf a habit instead of an occasion. The course is a pleasant, rolling parkland test, popular with leagues and outings, and it keeps the north side's golfers out of the tunnels and off the parkways, which in Pittsburgh traffic terms is a genuine architectural feature.

It finishes third because, course for course, it gives up a little to South Park in overall test and a great deal to the Bob in character. Third on this list is no insult. Pittsburgh's city golf closes the way it operates all summer: three parks, three full tee sheets, and the ravines of Schenley still holding the best story at the top.