Should we call Crystal Downs a Maxwell?

[Tom MacWood]

From what I understand it took several years for CD to be completed, and Maxwell and his construction man Woods were involved during the entire process. I believe this includes a period after Maxwell and Mackenzie partnership dissolved. Maxwell and Woods were both involved with U of Michigan too, and you have the map at Michigan that is clearly drawn by Maxwell. To my knowledge Mackenzie never mentioned CD or Michigan in any of his writing or advertisements, and there is strong evidence that Maxwell worked independently while partnered with Mackenzie.  IMO the evidence point to those courses being Maxwell's.

Don't CD and Michigan have more in common with Prairie Dunes than they do with Mackenzie's work at the time?

Tom MacWood,

How can the plan for UofM "CLEARLY" be drawn by Maxwell when Ron WHitten's research suggests that Maxwell didn't and couldn't draw plans?

Also, considering Maxwell came to Michigan directly after doing Old Town, perhaps those courses have more in common?

JC

There are two distinct course maps of UofM which are clearly of different hands.  I believe Maxwell routed a course and then Dr Mac made some changes - hence the two maps.  That isn't to say that either of them drew the maps though I think it plausible that Dr Mac drew the second one.  Although the final map does have Maxwell's signature and his office address on it, but it also includes Dr Mac as a designer (presumably co-designer). 

Ciao
Ciao

Mackenzie's plans are distinctive and easily identified. Neither of those plans look like anything he ever produced.

[JC Jones]

I now read on Dunlop White's great IMO piece on Old Town that Maxwell was hired in 1938.  That means, as Chris Clouser pointed out, that Old Town actually came 10 years AFTER the start of Crystal Downs.

[Tom_Doak]

Sorry for missing the date.  But perhaps that means Maxwell took the 13th green at Crystal Downs from MACKENZIE's design and used it in other places, instead of the other way around.

[DMoriarty]

As for the U of M map, Maxwell routed the course and in 1929 a routing map was produced, either by Woods or someone else in Ann Arbor.  My personal belief is that Maxwell hired someone to do the map in Ann Arbor but there is not a name on it anywhere, just a date (1929).  This routing was then altered by Mackenzie to reflect very much what is in place today at U of M, at least from a routing perspective.  

Chris,

What do you mean when you say it was "altered by Mackenzie . . . ??  Do you mean that he actually drew on the map, like a redline?  Or that he used it as the basis for a similar map?  Or what?      Where does the map signed by Maxwell fit into this?

 Thanks.

[Chris_Clouser]

Dave,

I mean that the original map by Maxwell (the first pass at the routing) was the basis of the final routing map.  The final one is actually the one signed by Maxwell with Mackenzie's named spelled incorrectly.  Hope that helps.

[Tom MacWood]

How do you know Mackenzie altered the plan?

[Chris_Clouser]

Tom Doak,

I've actually seen renditions of the 13th green at Crystal at places Maxwell did before CD.  Muskogee has one that is very similar, as does Oklahoma City, just not as severe.  I would hazard a guess that the original 3rd green at Dornick might have been that way, just a mirror image, before it was altered in the mid-1960s but that is complete guesswork on my part, but it would have fit in really nicely at that location.  That's why I'm wondering how much Maxwell followed Mac's plans on the back nine.  But without hard evidence it is hard to say that is strictly my personal hunch.  

Tom MacWood,

Based on evidence of Mackenzie's involvement and the fact that the final routing has some drastic differences I would be more than willing to say that Mackenzie provided the input on those changes from the initial routing to the final product.

[TEPaul]

"This has always been hard for me to visualize, since Crystal Downs was planned as a development from prior to MacKenzie's arrival,"



TomD:

That really is interesting and brings up some interesting points and questions about some of the old and significant courses and development plans. I generally tend not to think of residential development plans with some of the really old and significant courses at the time of their creation and planning but the fact is the following were done with or as part of planned residential developments, at least at first:

1. NGLA, even though the residential develoment plan did not survive.
2. Merion East--Connell and Lloyd
3. Mountain Lake---Olmsted
4. Fishers Island---Olmsted
5. Crystal Down---?
6. Pasatiempo---Olmsted?

Even Pine Valley had a residential development plan prior to creation but it did not survive anywhere near its original conception.

[Tom_Doak]

Tom P:

The National Golf Links of America had a development planned around it?  I've never heard that before.  Where was it going to be, and when?

The most interesting one I've seen is the plan in the archives at Chicago Golf Club to put 30 lots out in the middle of the golf course ... put together in the 1940's as the club was trying to survive.  Fortunately, they never did it, but the fact they had enough room for 30 one-acre lots inside the course will give people who have never been there an idea of the amount of extra room they have on property!

[Tom MacWood]

Tom MacWood,

Based on evidence of Mackenzie's involvement and the fact that the final routing has some drastic differences I would be more than willing to say that Mackenzie provided the input on those changes from the initial routing to the final product.

Chris
Isn't that speculation or an educated guess on your part?  

[Chris_Clouser]

Tom M.

I would say it goes beyond an educated guess.  That setup was similar to what happened on the Melrose project.  Other than a travel itenirary or photo of Mackenzie on site, I don't know how much more evidence you would need to come to that conclusion.  Another piece of evidence would be the use of the hourglass or boomerang style greens on two of the holes, that were nothing like that in the original routing by Maxwell.  Since that is clearly a Mackenzie element I think it would be a safe assumption that he was the one that prompted that change and the others that took place between the initial and final routing maps. 

Is your premise for not wanting to include Mackenzie in the design solely based on who signed the final routing map?

[TEPaul]

"Tom P:
The National Golf Links of America had a development planned around it?  I've never heard that before.  Where was it going to be, and when?"


TomD:

Apparently it did; it was certainly mentioned but it appears it did not survive at least not as a direct part of the club. I remember seeing the mention early on that something like 100 houses were contemplated.

I guess the houses would have ringed the course that wasn't shoreline. When NGLA bought the land they bought 205 acres of 450 acres that were for sale on what was known as Sebonac Neck.

I guess you know that one of the men who was a founder and who Macdonald even mentioned as one who would help with the course was big-time business man Charles A. Sabin who at some point bought the remainder of the 450 acres which became his massive estate and that is now Sebonack GC. And another mentioned by Macdonald who would help him with the course was James A. Stillman whose family controlled National City Bank. Stillman may've bought the land that became the original NGLA yacht basin area.

Those guys that Macdonald surrounded himself with throughout his entire career in architecture were some very serious "Captains of the Universe" I'll tell you. Just do some Google searches of the names of those involved with the creation of NGLA, Piping Rock, Sleepy Hollow, Greenbriar, Lido, Links, Deepdale, The Creek, Mid Ocean and Yale. Even St. Louis. You will be amazed who some of those people were and what they controlled. All the old bigtime names are part of the list from Vanderbilt, Whitney, Rockerfeller, Morgan et al on down the line.

[DMoriarty]

Tom P:

The National Golf Links of America had a development planned around it?  I've never heard that before.  Where was it going to be, and when?

I think the talk of a NGLA development plan got started when one of the usual suspects misread a newspaper article.   There wasn't a development plan, other than mention in the 1906 (07?) agreement that any left over land could be split up equally among the 60 founders.

There apparently was some leftover land-- I don't know how much-- and Macdonald's January 1912 letter said it was left to the discretion of the founders what to do with it.    

I dont think this constitutes a development plan, but I guess that depends upon what that means.    

[Tom MacWood]

There are number reasons:

1. There is no evidence AM ever visited Ann Arbor
2. There is no evidence AM was involved in the planning or revising the plans
3. Mackenzie never mentioned the project nor claimed it in any of his advertisements
4. In an interview in the NYTimes Maxwell explained how got the Michigan commission, and it had nothing to do with Mackenzie

[TEPaul]

TomD:

This development stuff could cut both ways. I don't know if you're aware of it but apparently Shinnecock came dangerously close to selling the course in the early 1950s to a real estate development.

I think Piping Rock came pretty close to going down the tubes too and may have had they not been saved by either Marshall Field (massive retailer) and/or Mortimer Schiff, managing partner of Kuhn Loeb.

But the real bummer for that crowd out there over which there are still some bitter feelings today was when The Creek Club took over Woman's National and combined it briefly with the Creek (and even under another name) before turning around and selling it out.

[JMEvensky]

 And another mentioned by Macdonald who would help him with the course was James A. Stillman whose family controlled National City Bank. Stillman may've bought the land that became the original NGLA yacht basin area.

Any chance this James Stillman marries into the Rockefeller family or a Rockefeller marries into his?

[TEPaul]

"Any chance this James Stillman marries into the Rockefeller family or a Rockefeller marries into his?"


Jeff:

Definitely. I think I noticed that somewhere while doing some research not too long ago.

Basically I have found that that was an incredibly centripetal world back then for various reasons that basically revolved around the same schools, colleges, business networks and even clubs to a large extent. Obviously that kind of stuff fosters intermarrying too.

For instance, I found the other day that my mother's family whose name was Clark, also married into the Rockefeller family. I actually found this on some site that contained the entire history of the Sloane Kettering Hospital, perhaps the original research center and hospital on cancer research. If you want to find some seriously tight family connections and ancestories just Google Sloane Kettering and its history.

I never thought much about it or what it meant back then but one time many years ago I went to the Opera in New York with my maternal grandmother and during intermission we walked by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's ex-wife Happy Rockefeller, and my grandmother said to her; "You and I are related in a way." It turns out Happy Rockefeller was a Clark and my grandmother's first husband and my mother's father was Louis C. Clark, a man who ran a pretty important specialty Wall Street brokerage firm back then known as Clark Dodge Co.

There were many and diverse businesses that tight crowd around particularly New York but also Philadephia and Boston were into but in a real way they all came together over and around Wall Street which a fairly tight group had massive control over due to basically "combinations" or the arrangements that some would call monopoly or trusts.

Many of those guys were obviously massively rich but in my opinon nowhere near as rich in "real" dollars as some are today. But what those guys had over even the richest in the country and the world today is they had incredible control over so many of the core industries of America such as the railroads, steel, the utilities (oil and electricity), shipping, and on down to things like the dry goods businesses as well as land development such as Flager in Florida, an original partner of John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil.

This kind of thing never would've caught my interest if it wasn't for golf and basically doing research in the last ten or so years into the histories of various clubs in America and people in and around golf and even its administration in America---eg the USGA. Some of the same names keep coming up again and again and when you begin to sort of graph them back then, even in your mind, and then do some Google research on who they were, what they did, and what all they controlled, and basically in some overriding, far-reaching "combinations," it gets pretty interesting certainly historically and certainly compared to today's world of ultra-internationalism, and particularly China!
 

[Link Walsh]

Many of those guys were obviously massively rich but in my opinon nowhere near as rich in "real" dollars as some are today. But what those guys had over even the richest in the country and the world today is they had incredible control over so many of the core industries of America such as the railroads, steel, the utilities (oil and electricity), shipping, and on down to things like the dry goods businesses as well as land development such as Flager in Florida, an original partner of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil.
 
[/quote]


Actually, if you adjust for inflation, Rockefeller was worth in real dollars, depending on what website you use, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3 times as much as Bill Gates.  Usually if you look at lists of the wealthiest people of all time, the top 4 or 5 all come from the Gilded Age of the late 1800s.  I know that's a generation ahead of the time you're talking about, but they still had money to burn.   

[TEPaul]

Link:

That kind of stuff is sort of interesting to me but only in some kind of historical context with passing interest that involves numbers that aren't really all that interesting to me in the final analysis. I am no economist or economic historian either, even though I have seen some pretty interesting analogies and comparisons in various forms of "real" dollar adjustments.

The kinds of people who interest me the most are the likes of C.B. Macdonald who I figure was and/or now is considered to be the father of American architecture but if things over his career in golf in America had broken for him somewhat differently for various reasons or as he apparently hoped and may've expected, may've been considered the father of American golf itself if not perhaps the father of golf period. That was not to happen, in my opinion, and the reasons why I find truly interesting and well worth the candle, as Bob Crosby says, with ongoing research into that time and those people.

The ones who seem to come out on top as the richest in real dollar adjustment might be the Vanderbilts or particularly the Astors. At some point around the latter half of the 19th century a guy from New York by the name of Waldorf Astor came to Philadelphia for some reason and fell in love with and married a gal named Mary "Nonie" Paul, a quaker who lived on Bryn Mawr Ave, not far from where Merion now is. That man was considered to be the richest man in America and perhaps the world because of the Astor fur business and the fact the Astors owned so much of New York City.

By all accounts Waldorf Astor was sort of a jerk and asshole and after he ran for congress and lost he got pissed and expatriated to England in anger and essentially created the English component of the Astor family. He took his wife Nonie (nee Paul) with him and they had three children over there and created that famous place in England called "Cliveden." She died in child-birth with the third child who was William Waldorf Astor, I think, who married Nancy Langehorne, a Southern belle from Virginia who became the famous Lady Astor as well as the first women member of Parliament and she was a born American to boot.

She was a parliament contempory of the young Winston Churchill and the generator of all those famous remarks and insults that go both ways about each other----ex "Winston, you are drunk again." Lady Astor, you are ugly." "Oh Winston, that proves you are drunk." Nevetheless, Lady Astor, tomorrow I'll be sober."

Or--"Winston, If I were your wife, I would poison your coffee." "Lady Astor, if I were your husband, I would drink it."

[Sean_A]

There are number reasons:

1. There is no evidence AM ever visited Ann Arbor
2. There is no evidence AM was involved in the planning or revising the plans
3. Mackenzie never mentioned the project nor claimed it in any of his advertisements
4. In an interview in the NYTimes Maxwell explained how got the Michigan commission, and it had nothing to do with Mackenzie

Tommy Mac

You are trying to split hairs.  Max and Mac were a partnership no?  Mac has his name on the final plans yes?  I don't see any reason to exclude Mac especially with there is no evidence he ever visited Ann Arbor.  It was a very easy trip by train to/from Grand Rapids. 

Could you post the NY Times article?

Ciao

[Sean_Tully]

Tom,

You stated, "While no one knows what Seth Raynor's routing for Cypress Point looked like -- other than including the 16th hole per Marion Hollins..."

I may have inadvertently stumbled across the a copy of the Raynor Cypress Point proposed course. In some recent researches for another California course, I discovered that at Stanford University: Manuscripts Division, there is a collection titled "Samuel F.B. Morse papers, 1911-1969" in which BOX 4, FOLDER 42, contains telegrams between Marion Hollins and Roger Lapham concerning the incorporation of the "Cypress point Golf Club."

More importantly, in BOX 4, FOLDER 43, contains the following: "Includes correspondence regarding the organization, incorporation and construction of Cypress Point U.C., blueprint of golf course and residential subdivision surrounding it. Contract of sale between D.M.P.C. and Cypress Point Golf Club.

Most importantly, BOX 4, FOLDER 44, contains "Sale of Land for Cypress Point Golf Club." The scope and contents note states, "Marion Hollins secured an option to buy a certain amount of land from D.M.P.C. to be made into Cypress Point U.C. also includes her proposal of the Club and a tentative contract."

If anyone out that way wants to take a look email me and I'll give you all the details I have. If you can wait, then when I'm next out that way in a couple of months, I'll definitely go see what they have.

Just from the descriptions and notes about the different parts of the collection I am led to believe that at least a basic routing of the proposed Raynor course must be part of it because these refer to the"proposed" land purchase, which would have been ebfore Mackenzie and Hunter were brought in.
 

Tom,

You stated, "While no one knows what Seth Raynor's routing for Cypress Point looked like -- other than including the 16th hole per Marion Hollins..."

I may have inadvertently stumbled across the a copy of the Raynor Cypress Point proposed course. In some recent researches for another California course, I discovered that at Stanford University: Manuscripts Division, there is a collection titled "Samuel F.B. Morse papers, 1911-1969" in which BOX 4, FOLDER 42, contains telegrams between Marion Hollins and Roger Lapham concerning the incorporation of the "Cypress point Golf Club."

More importantly, in BOX 4, FOLDER 43, contains the following: "Includes correspondence regarding the organization, incorporation and construction of Cypress Point U.C., blueprint of golf course and residential subdivision surrounding it. Contract of sale between D.M.P.C. and Cypress Point Golf Club.

Most importantly, BOX 4, FOLDER 44, contains "Sale of Land for Cypress Point Golf Club." The scope and contents note states, "Marion Hollins secured an option to buy a certain amount of land from D.M.P.C. to be made into Cypress Point U.C. also includes her proposal of the Club and a tentative contract."

If anyone out that way wants to take a look email me and I'll give you all the details I have. If you can wait, then when I'm next out that way in a couple of months, I'll definitely go see what they have.

Just from the descriptions and notes about the different parts of the collection I am led to believe that at least a basic routing of the proposed Raynor course must be part of it because these refer to the"proposed" land purchase, which would have been ebfore Mackenzie and Hunter were brought in.
 

Phil-

Thanks for the mention of this thread, I have been away from GCA for a while. I have seen the Lapham papers and know that Gordon Radcliff is familiar with them as well. He has passed the info onto the club. I have a copy of the routing map that is mentioned in the Lapham files and it is a stick drawing of a routing for Cypress Point that is all but the same as the artist rendering of the routing map that was drawn by Albert Burrows for MacKenzie. This drawing is reproduced in Shackelford's book on Cypress Point Golf Club.

Tully

[Phil_the_Author]

Thanks Sean. Is there any indication of the date for that routing?

[Tom MacWood]

Tommy Mac

You are trying to split hairs.  Max and Mac were a partnership no?  Mac has his name on the final plans yes?  I don't see any reason to exclude Mac especially with there is no evidence he ever visited Ann Arbor.  It was a very easy trip by train to/from Grand Rapids. 

Could you post the NY Times article?

Ciao

I think anyone familiar with Mackenzie's career would acknowledge their brief partnership was a little unusual. The majority of their projects, if not all of them, were projects secured by Maxwell, and in one or two cases before they became partners. Mackenzie was based in California, where he partnered with Hunter and used the American Construction Company. Maxwell had nothing to do with these courses. When Mac ventured outside California he worked with Wendell Miller. Maxwell had nothing to do with these courses. I believe all the Mackenzie & Maxwell courses were constructed by Woods, who built Maxwell's courses before and after the partnership. Some partnerships collaborate and some work independently, it is my impression Maxwell and Mackenzie worked independently, and I believe the nature of "their designs" is confirmation of that.

[TEPaul]

"I think anyone familiar with Mackenzie's career would acknowledge their brief partnership was a little unusual."


I think the way Mackenzie tended to partner with others, particularly Maxwell, might be considered unusal if Mackenzie was American. But he wasn't. The way Mackenzie tended to partner with American architects wasn't much different than the way Hugh Alison tried to partner in various ways with an American architect, in his case William Flynn. Perhaps even Harry Colt tried to partner on some of his early projects over here with others in various ways. The reason seems obvious to me----eg those English architects did not have any local or regional crews over here or any crews at all and partnering with an American architect was one good way to accomplish that.

[Tom MacWood]

Alison was a completely different situation. Alison was looking for someone to build his golf courses, not someone to assist in the design. Over the years he was assisted on the construction end by George Penglase and LE Lavis. He called them associates, but to my knowledge neither man ever assisted in the design of any of his courses. Flynn was an experienced construction man at the time he was approached (in fact he'd built one or more courses for Alison), and therefore would have made a perfect construction associate.

Maxwell was an experienced golf architect, who had his own construction man....that was a much different situation. Maxwell & Mackenzie's  relationship appears to be closer to the relationship Colt and Mackenzie had, which was more or less two independent architects working for the same firm.