Aronimink Golf Club

Aronimink is an object lesson in architectural evolution. After Donald Ross completed his design in 1928, he proclaimed, “I intended to make this my masterpiece.” That didn’t keep club members from bringing in William Gordon in the 1950s to eliminate out-of-play fairway bunkers and move other bunkers closer to greens. The course was later revamped by Dick Wilson, George Fazio and Robert Trent Jones. In the 1990s and into the 2000s, Ron Prichard, one of the profession’s original restoration specialists, began returning Aronimink back to Ross’ conception based on the architect’s drawings and field diagrams. But there was always a discrepancy between what Ross drew in plans and what was actually built in 1928. A more recent renovation by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, who live nearby, has put the course’s architecture more in line with what aerial photographs depict of the early design, particularly the bunkering that might have been imagined as larger in scale but built in smaller, more scatter-shot formations.