2 vegetables in 1 hole?! Why this popular US Open site has added a surprising twist

If you live in New Jersey, as I do for you, you don’t have to be a golfer to at least have one hear it of Baltusrol Golf Club, in the same way that you don’t have to be a music lover to hear about Carnegie Hall or a beef aficionado to be familiar with Katz’s Delicatessen. The place is an institution: 130 years; a venue for 18 major tournaments; home to a 50,000-square-foot Tudor Revival-style clubhouse that is among the game’s most iconic buildings. The club is so historic that in 2014 it was designated a National Historic Landmark. All that’s missing from Balty’s cv is a Ken Burns film – and, who knows, maybe he’s coming.

Baltusrol has two excellent and challenging courses – Lower and Upper, both designed by the legendary AW Tillinghast – which make the club unique in this region of the country. The same can be said of Winged Foot (about 50 miles northeast); Westchester Country Club (not far from Winged Foot); Trump Bedminster (25 miles to the west); and Philly Cricket (80 miles southwest); among others.

Here’s an interesting wrinkle, however: Balty’s membership draws on a higher level and more floor in these two courses (Bottom) but instead in the “other” option – Top. This isn’t to say that team members aren’t proud of their most popular offering or that they don’t enjoy testing their games outside; it’s just that if they’re sneaking in for a nine o’clock after work or playing a friendly Saturday-morning four-ball, many members choose to do so with a less damaging Upper.

That’s truer today than ever because of the recent restorations made by restorers Good day Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, who also helped restore the lower course to its rich Tilly roots with restoration work they completed in 2021. “The Lower had undergone many structural changes in the name of hosting tournaments,” said Hanse at the Upper reopening event I attended earlier this year. “Upper was kind of a little sleeper golf course that stayed there.”

Sleepy but very loved! While the Lower scares you with its length and big hazards (like the Sahara bunker complex on the par-5 17th), the Upper delights with a variety of settings and hole designs, thanks to its hillside home. (I enjoyed it, though; my summer round at the Upper was my favorite round of 2025.) Working with a collection of archival photos and maps, Hanse and Wagner expanded the greens to their original size and removed trees to open sight lines but didn’t deviate from Tillinghast’s original intent.

When I asked Hanse if he ever felt like he and his team could improve on the old planner’s goals (nobody’s perfect, right?), he said, “Obviously we’re modernizing golf courses, moving bunkers down, putting back tees, etc. But you’re trying to figure out why.” [a designer] did something or, ‘Was that a mistake?’ – is something that we really try to avoid because it just leads to other conclusions that may not produce the best results from a recovery point of view.”

One – if not i – the most interesting questions Hanse and Wagner faced along the way came on the 4th 14th, when the club, preparing to play in the 1936 US Open, added a second green. The first putting green, which sits on low ground, sometimes flooded when rainwater came down the hill, so the club installed a second green as a backup. Sometime in the late 1950s, the club abandoned the second green, and in the years that followed it was lost in the sands. . . well, pollution the time.

So Hanse started digging.

“When Gil started exploring the proper green, he was able to find the remains of that green because back then, they weren’t built; they just cultivated things,” Matt Wirths, president of Baltusrol. he told me last summer. “He was able to see the old stratifications of the vegetation, and he was also able to see the dimensions.”

What to do? Hanse was torn. “First of all, we decided to give up the green which is not real, which is superficial,” said Hanse. “When we found the first contours of the lower green, the upper green was about six to seven meters above it, and we thought, ‘You can’t stay together.

But Hanse then asked his maker to dig more. “We’re going to blow it up anyway,” Hanse remembers thinking. “Let’s remove all the dirt from the road and see if we can get the first grade, we got it, that came out, it came back to these two. [greens] being able to live together well. “

Whether Hanse and the club would keep the green second in play, however, remained an open question throughout the restoration; some members liked the idea while others were not so happy, fearing that it was too complicated or fake.

One of the key deciding factors was that Tillinghast had an affinity for double greens, so much so that he actually mapped the course in Atlanta in the 1920s with double greens on every hole. Wirths said the Depression prevented the study from becoming a reality, but the plans alone were enough of an indication that Tillinghast was right about the unusual design feature. “That was one log of the last fire on both greens,” Wirths said.

And he kept them in the club. If you play your second shot at 14 today, the challenge – depending on which green is played – can look very different from one round to the next. It’s novel, it’s fun and it makes you wonder why the game has to have two vegetables.

As for which spot is higher, the jury is still out, which is appropriate for a two-course club where members often make difficult decisions.

“I think we’ll take a year to watch it and see how it plays out,” Hanse said. “And then we can decide that [the club swaps out greens] every other day even if the green is more suitable for the tournament than the other.”