Glen View Club

Charles Blair Macdonald collaborated with H.J. Tweedie on the design of Glen View Club in 1897 on a piece of Golf, Illinois land north of Chicago. The course is one of the earliest American eighteen-hole routings — predating Macdonald's later National Golf Links and the architectural framework he established for American championship golf. Glen View hosted the 1902 U.S. Amateur (Louis James won) and the 1904 U.S. Open (Willie Anderson, his third championship), putting the club into the championship rotation during American golf's first decade. The course has been redesigned multiple times since the original routing, with most modern work focused on tree-management and agronomic updates rather than architectural redesign.

The course plays around 6,800 yards par 72 from the back markers, with bent fairways and a slope in the upper 130s. The yardage is short by modern championship standards, but the routing's age and the institutional history give it significance independent of contemporary championship-rotation evaluation. The fairways play firm given the Illinois prairie subsoil. The fifteenth hole is a 440-yard par-4 with a tee shot played over a creek; the seventeenth, a 195-yard par-3 across a natural pond, is the routing's most-discussed one-shotter.

Glen View Club is private and access is members and accompanied guests only. The membership is regional Chicago North Shore business and professional families with multi-generation ties through the club's late-1800s founding. The institutional history through American golf's first thirty years is part of the club's identity, and the membership has stayed deliberately quiet about national rankings.

Chicago North Shore climate gives Glen View a playing season of April through October. The course closes through Chicago winter and reopens when the soil thaws — typically late April. The mature tree canopy through the property gives the routing a parkland character that distinguishes it from the more open prairie courses elsewhere in the area. The autumn color through October is part of the seasonal photographic signature.