If Herbert Fowler designed a course during golf’s Golden Age, just down the road from Alister MacKenzie’s Pasatiempo – indeed, if said course opened in the
same year (1929) – in the golf-rich area of Monterey Bay, and if that course lived a good 33 years, then would not this course be known far and wide?
Not to gild a lily born in golf’s Golden Age, but what if this course was commissioned by a swashbuckling character, a man responsible not only for a golf course but for an entire mega-development? And what if, after this character suffered a public bankruptcy
almost unbelievably, right at the time the course opened, another prominent millionaire purchased the course, a man whose son became a famous explorer and whose wife was a society columnist?
Surely a course like this, open to the public, down the road from the home course of another famous designer, born out of a course-building boom in America’s arguably most-heralded golfing locale, sponsored by a larger-than-life figure – surely this course would have earned some meager renown, would have escaped the slipstream of the temporal and found at least a purchase in the historical, an agate type’s measure of remembrance?
But no. And so like any good 1920s detective story, we must look for the twist, the “either / or”: What if Fowler in fact did not design it, a case of mistaken identity? Or…what if he designed not one but
two courses, for the same sponsor, in the same area – of which only one was built? What if the course, upon coming into existence immediately and then with depressing regularity afterwards, changed hands in a property version of Three-Card Monte? Would that obscure the origins of the course and consign it to the ash heap of history?
This then is the story of Monterey Bay Golf & Country Club, commissioned and funded by San Francisco speculator H. Allen Rispin, maybe designed by Fowler, and opened 1929. Confusingly, it is also the story of “Capitola-by-the-Sea,” designed by Fowler but never built, perhaps an unintentional veil cast over Monterey Bay, or perhaps the only course Fowler designed for Rispin.
As with Emma Thompson’s character(s) in “Dead Again,” we are left to wonder who is who – or, resisting the urge to personify these fleeting courses as characters, which is which.
ProvenanceAccording to local historian Carolyn Swift (the source of information on Capitola, Rispin, as well as the photographs), Rispin originally wanted his golf course close to home. A 1922 map shows plans for a course across Soquel Creek from his mansion, on the site of a beet sugar farm. This area is south of Soquel Road, roughly a half-mile inland from Capitola Beach and Monterey Bay.
In fact, an undated Fowler advertisement listing courses laid out or remodeled by Fowler includes “Capitola-by-the-Sea: plans for eighteen-hole seaside links.”
So Fowler
did design a course, in Capitola, near the sea (Monterey Bay), for Rispin.
A golf course would have fit into Rispin’s grand plans to turn Capitola, regarded as California’s oldest resort (dating to 1874), into a grand Spanish Colonial Revival retreat. Purchasing Capitola in 1919, the San Francisco speculator’s plans included paved streets, a yacht club and fishing lodge, a waterside Venetian Court complex, a boathouse and beach lagoon, and the golf course. In ambition and subsequent fate, Rispin’s arc sadly tracked not Paris Singer of Singer Island and Palm Beach but rather D.P. Davis of Tampa and Carl Fisher of Miami Beach. Rispin’s fall, when it came in 1929, was complete.
But we are getting ahead of the story. It is not known how Rispin came into contact with Fowler. It could have been earnest prospecting by Fowler – he did remodel Old Del Monte down the road and certainly would have heard of Rispin’s grand plans for making Capitola into a high-end development.
More likely, Fowler would have leveraged stronger connections: his Burlingame CC opened in 1922 just up the road in San Francisco. Burlingame comes up periodically in articles about Soquel, Capitola, and Santa Cruz. One of its prominent members was Robert Hays Smith. Smith, whose son Nicol gained temporal fame in the midsection of the Twentieth Century as an explorer but before that would assume duties managing Monterey Bay G&CC, invested in Capitola alongside Rispin in 1919. Perhaps the Capitola-by-the-Sea commission begat the Burlingame job. Or perhaps it was the other way around. No matter, the connectivity hints at a business relationship stronger than short-term transactional.
Monterey Bay GC might well have been a drive-by or mail-in for Fowler, at least as far as actual construction goes – but if Fowler wasn’t there for the creation, one suspects a relationship strong enough to overcome that immense distance between England and California, strong enough to produce a decent outcome. Assuming of course Fowler designed the course in the first place.
At some point, Rispin gave up on the Capitola site and decided to develop a 315-acre parcel roughly one mile north-northeast, in the neighboring community of Soquel. Did Fowler make a return trip to California sometime in the mid-to-late 1920s to inspect this property and draw up plans for a new course? Or did Rispin show Fowler this property during the design of Capitola? If so, did Fowler recommend the dramatic topography of the Soquel property? Did Fowler draw up plans for both sites in 1920-22? Assuming Fowler drew up the Soquel plans during the early 1920s, is it realistic to assume Rispin would have waited seven or so years to begin construction? And when construction went ahead on the Soquel property, did Fowler visit?
It is not known exactly when construction began on the property; however, according to Swift, “most of [Rispin’s] financial resources in 1929 were spent toward the creation of the Soquel golf course.”
The course, occupying 130 acres, opened in mid-July. One week later, Rispin’s holding company announced it was liquidating its portfolio, golf course included. The Frank Meline auction firm was commissioned to sell 1,500 business and residential lots, the golf course and a host of other holdings, notably the Rispin Mansion.
Several weeks before the auction occurred, this article appeared in the Hayward Daily Review. It is the sole reference linking Fowler to this course I have been able to find:
