Hal Purdy: New Jersey's Most Prolific Public Architect

Most golfers in northern New Jersey have played a Hal Purdy course without ever knowing it. He built 48 of them across the tri-state region between 1961 and the late 1990s, with another handful in Kentucky, Virginia, and Indiana. Country clubs, daily-fee tracks, county munis, state-park courses. A Purdy round was usually walkable, usually fair, and almost always priced for the working golfer.

Purdy was born in 1905 in Wabash, Indiana. His path to course design did not start the way most architects of his era began. He took a job at a local engineering firm out of school, and when the Depression hit he ended up operating Lost Creek Golf Club in Lima, Ohio, learning the business of golf from the ground level. After World War II he moved into construction management and rose to executive vice president of a building firm. The pivot came in 1956, when he signed on as construction supervisor for Robert Trent Jones Sr.

That apprenticeship under RTJ Sr. shaped everything that followed. Purdy spent his time on the heavy-equipment end of the business, watching the leading architect of the postwar boom translate plans into earthwork. By the early 1960s he was working under his own name, mostly in New Jersey. He was elected to the American Society of Golf Course Architects in 1973 and served four years on its board. His son Mal Purdy joined the practice and was also an ASGCA member.

A Working Architect's Style

Purdy did not chase the spectacular. Architects and players who have studied his work describe a recognizable approach: well-routed and walkable layouts, holes positioned as the property presented them, and a clear preference for moving as little dirt as the budget allowed. His public courses tend to feature clean, basic green complexes and bunkering that maintenance crews could actually keep up with. The private commissions, where budgets were larger, show more interesting green contouring and shaping.

Tom Doak's Confidential Guide once described one of the courses as a "Hal Purdy contraption," and the line stuck. It captures something about the era. Purdy was building during the same boom that produced Geoffrey Cornish in New England, Ed Ault in the Mid-Atlantic, and Jack Kidwell in Ohio: a generation of regional architects whose job was to give a growing middle class somewhere to play, fast, on a tight budget. Architectural fame was not the point.

Notable Designs in the Database

Among the 48 Purdy courses currently on Stymie, the design range is wide. Burning Tree Country Club in Greenwich, Connecticut is one of his earliest private commissions, opened in 1962. Forsgate Country Club in Monroe Township is the most interesting story in the portfolio: the second course at Forsgate carries Arnold Palmer's name, but Purdy did the actual design work.

For pure shot value, Fairmount Country Club in Chatham plays to a slope of 146 from the back tees, one of the toughest Purdy ratings on record. Battleground Country Club in Manalapan stretches to nearly 6,925 yards with a 139 slope. On the Connecticut side, H Smith Richardson Golf Course in Fairfield is a 1972 Purdy public that still ranks among the better daily-fee plays in Fairfield County.

His geographic reach extended further than the tri-state map suggests. Harmony Landing outside Louisville and Luray Caverns Country Club & Resort in the Shenandoah Valley both came out of his shop, evidence that his Northeast base did not box him in.

The Legacy

Purdy died in 2002 at 97. He never produced a Top 100 course, never built a major championship venue, and rarely shows up in golf-architecture rankings. What he did do was give the metropolitan New York region several dozen golf courses that have hosted weekend foursomes for sixty years and counting. Every region of the country has an architect like this, and every region needs one.

View all courses by Hal Purdy on Stymie