Andyl:
That's an interesting question about some connection between golf architects and building architects or perhaps between Flynn and a Philadelphia building architectural force like Trumbauer.
In all our research we've never seen such a thing between Flynn and Trumbaurer or any other well known building architects and Flynn. If there was any at all perhaps the closest might have been the developer Clarence Geist (Philadelphia), architect Addison Mizner and Flynn in Boca Raton that Geist essentially completely created as one massive project!
Another triumverate of developer/building architect/golf architect was the almost duplicate projects of Mountain Lake (Florida) and Fishers Island with Ruth/Olmstead/Raynor.
There's absolutely no question, though, that those rich people, generally referred to as the WASP world did very much have their favorite building architects and golf architects. Just before and after the turn of the 20th century the massive boom of the so-called summer communities all up and down the East coast of America that were created and populated by this WASP world was evidence of this. There were scores and scores of these WASP vacation communities--all up and down the Florida East Coast (Flagler), the Sea Islands of Georgia, the shore of New Jersey, the North and South shores and the East End of Long Island, islands like Fishers, Newport, Edgartown, Watch Hill, the Cape in Mass and the numerous island and coast communities in Maine (Northeast Harbor, Islesboro etc)!
It's rather incredible that people from basically Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, with a few from cities such as Chicago and particularly St Louis all used their various city architects to build for them in these combined WASP summer communities.
A very good example of this was something called Isleboro (or Dark Harbor) that was started as a corporation of rich WASP subcribers in the end of the 19th century. In many ways that community which still goes strong hasn't changed much in appearance from that time. The participants were the WASP world exclusively bascially started by Philadelphians but almost an equal original number from Boston and New York, Baltimore and St Louis.
In the last few years when reading about and tracking these types of summer communities and their golf courses and architects I began to wonder both why they sprung up so fast and why they included the same people up and down those East coast cities who all basically seemed to know each other.
As to why they sprung up so fast---there's this very common theme, and wording too, in many of those early prospectuses and community charters and by-laws etc.
That common wording is "dirty air"!!
Isn't that interesting? Obviously all these interconnected WASPs wanted to get their families out of the cities they worked in because they were frankly disgustingly flithy as a result of the pollution of the booming industrial revolution that was part of what made some of them so rich!
But how did that WASP world all come to know each other so well from city to city? That fact hit me like a ton of bricks when my dad died in 1992 and I was cleaning some of his effects out of his house. I came upon this little class book from the school he went to---called Groton School in Mass. His entire class was listed as to where they all went to college and in his class, something like 1932, EVER SINGLE member of his class went to Harvard, Yale or Princeton (except one from Calif. who went to Stanford).
So there you have it--they all knew each other from city to city and community to community up and down the US East coast because basically ALL of them went to the same schools and the same few colleges together. Anyone can imagine then how they all started to intermarry between city to city and so forth. This was true of my own mother and father and not only that my fathers sister and my mother's brother married!
And where did they all meet? In Islesboro (Dark Harbor) Maine when small children although my mother's family was from New York and my father's family from Philadelphia. And this is the same way it was in all those communities and cities in the WASP world that's sort of gone now compared to what it once was with its power back then.
There's frankly sort of a phenomenon going on right now in many of those old WASP summer communities. Many of those old families are still there but the powerhouses of many of those communities today are a new group made up of the new stars of American culture----the bigtime Wall Street tycoons and related financial businesses but particularly the Hollywood crowd!
Easthampton has the likes of Steven Spieberg a ton of others like him---so does Southampton, and even in Dark Harbor (a very small little Maine Island community made of those originally from that old WASP world of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and St Louis) my own great grandfather's house is now owned by John Travolta.
Why are those old WASP communities now populated by the new power culture? If you ask me, it's because they offer not only real privacy but it's nearly impossible to miss the fact that those old communities, their homes and the entire aura of them offer a style and a taste that's recognized as the real deal by an increasing number today!
That old WASP world was primarily English in cutlure (WASP=White Anglo Saxon Protestant) and even managed to marry their rich daughters into the British Royal world bigtime because they really had the status but often not the money!
I believe, as I've said on here that America stops and looks back from time to time and that Old WASP world and much about the way it was--the easy-going style that was one of true taste is one they've definitely looked back to. Frankly, it's what many of us on this website find so appealing about some of their golf courses, the aura of their clubhouses and everything about the way they were!
Just look at any of the ads of Ralph Lauren in the last 15 years and you can't help but notice what I mean by all this. Ralph Lauren (Ralph Lipshitz) recognized something appealing about that old WASP world, the look and aura of their clothes, perhaps 20 years ago and he turned it into a fashion powerhouse.
Such is the interesting cyclical culture of much about the way America is, in my opinion! Every country and culture seems to need something to aspire to at any particular time and that glamorous, easy going WASP world with it's taste and style but also its basically closed ethos was once sort of the American aristocracy.
Again, it's pretty much gone now as Digby Baltzell sort of predicted and tracked. It's probably been replaced by the movie and TV star and the new financial tycoons as the new American aristocracy and isn't it interesting that many of them actually live in the communities and houses of those old WASPs?