"Tom, that whole Merion bunker fight slightly predated my time here, but looking at the pics Craig linked to, there is something odd about many of them. They seem to have about a 1' high perfectly vertical face to them--is that how they actually look in person or is it a function of the pictures and that I am having a bad contact lens day?"
Andy:
I don't know what you mean by some 1 foot high vertial wall on some of the Merion bunkers. I don't think so. Perhaps you're referring to what some architects call the "angle of repose" which is a sand upsweep angle that is sometimes considered to be Nature's strongest angle (strongest in it's ability to endure). That might be referred to as Nature's own Darwinianism. It also seems to occur with tree roots sweeping into trunks or the underside of branches.
One thing I will most certainly admit however with the present Merion East bunkers is they do not look much of anything like any of the interesting iterations of the previous Merion bunkers that evolved through the years.
Merion's original bunkers were fairly bland and generic shapes (on purpose apparently) that were allowed to grass in with some evolutionary capes and bays on some and with grass/sand lines that at one point (1930s) became quite "lacy edged". That "grassing in" process took many years and apparently became something of a Flynn bunker construction standard.
However, the basic construction and style of Merion East's bunkering was always very sand flashed faces. This is probably why they became know as "The White Faces of Merion" (Bob Jones's name for them).
Ron Prichard actually believes that the Merion bunker style became something of the basic generic style of many American bunkers. The basic idea or style was for maximum sand visibility to the golfer confronting them with his shot.
It appears this idea and perhaps style was uniquely Hugh Wilson's but I'm not sure that anyone really knows where he came up with this bunker style or idea.
We do know that Wilson had some particular ideas about the look and visibility of bunker sand to the golfer and we do know he had some specific ideas about progressive recovery from them.
For these reasons the Merion bunkers were not designed with vertical faces of sand or grass. They were more high upsweeps of sand to a rather low profile grass surround on top.
Over the years some of the green fronting bunkers (which logically get much more play) such as #8 and #13 grew substantially over the years from what we call "sand kick" or "Evolutionary Buildup". On those two examples the top surrounds grew in height as much as 4-5 feet. So, yes, those ones did become more vertical through evolution.
The present Merion bunkers were reconstructed with an earthen "roll" on the top surround and grass was sodded over that roll and stapled down over it giving the bunkers a far more "grassed over" look than they ever had before.
Interestingly all the reconstructed bunkers of Merion East came out looking much more like those two fronting bunkers on #8 and #13 with their massive evolutionary buildup and rolled over grass tops.
Before the recent bunker project I doubt Merion's bunkers had ever undergone a comprehensive construction overhaul in their history. Having had basically two supers up until the 1980s (The Valentines, father and son) Merion's bunkers over the years had simply been "fixed" in a piecemeal fashion when the need arose.
In recent years when mainteance transitioned from scythes to mechanized weedeaters the grass surrounds, particularly on top became far more clean and clipped than they had been in the 1930, 1940s and 1950 etc.
Before the recent bunker project the drainage and the sanding had basically completely failed. Sand was leaking out of the low and incoming sides and many of the top surrounds were crumbling and in need of repair.
What the old sand condtion did to playability is make all the bunkers play something like a hard packed dirt road. Good players could handle that condition much better than less good players. The hard packed lies in those old bunkers made consistent recovery for inexperienced players really tough.
But I know from experience that those old bunkers were nowhere near as difficult "architecturally" to get out of. The difficulty of them was in the sand lies not the architecture.
Now Merion has flip-flopped that----eg today they have much easier and more consistent sand lies to play from but the "architecture" of them is deeper and steeper and more difficult to recover from due to height and increased verticality of the faces (mostly the grass).
And the grass surrounds, particularly on the tops of the outgoing sides is about ten times thicker and more "Grassy" than Merion's bunkers have ever been in their history.
There's one other thing you should know I think is safe to say and that is they apparently used primarily aerial photographs in the recent bunker project. What that does is make length and width easy to duplicate but the height dimension does not show up on aerials so that is quite different from the way they ever were before.
In other words, if you looked at old aerials and compared them to an aerial of the bunkers today they would look remarkably similar (length and width) but definitely not from the ground and player's eye view---eg the height dimension.
What some of us initially recommended before the recent bunker project was that Merion simply redo the bunkers in two steps----eg redo the drainage and sanding and basically leave the old grass surrounds alone and just fix them. But they decided to do the project in three areas---drainage, sanding as well as taking all the old surrounds apart and reconstructing them.
The latter or third step is obviously what gives the present bunkers their far more grassy and "grassed over" look than anything the bunkers had ever had before.
Having said all that I actually like the look of Merion East's bunkers a lot, but, again, it is not the grass look or old very much upswept sand face look they always had before.
But, again, this one foot vertical wall you speak of---I don't know what you mean and I don't see that on course when one looks at them in person.