Jason
I know history and the history of golf architecture is not your bag, nor is it TE's, but for those interested in golf architecture and transcendant designs here are few quotes on Engineers & Herb Strong.
Gil Hanse:
"Our thoughts on Engineers run very strong and very deep. Unfortunately they have been singed with frustration over the years. We have had a very long relationship with the club, and we have tried to be very patient in our efforts to restore this gem. Unfortunately the membership does not appreciate what they have, and the sentiment amongst a lot of the members is that it is a mickey mouse course with wild greens that are 'UNFAIR'. That has to be one of my most hated words in golf, that and 'backdrop' set off something in me. Anyway, I digress, the original layout at Engineers was so grand in scale and ambition that I think it could be one of the landmark courses of this era. It is the only course I know of to host two major championships in its first 3 years of existence (1917 PGA and 1920 US Amateur), excepting Augusta. So it was highly regarded in its prime as one of the top courses in the country. Unfortunately over the years many of the massive sand areas have been grassed in and trees have dominated the course.
Our efforts have been to restore the course to its original grandeur, and we have been steadfast in our reluctance to do anything other than that. The combination of our resolve, and the clubs reluctance to take on the whole project have meant that we have been at a standstill for quite awhile. I am hopeful that the club will eventually relent and that we can go forward with restoring a great course.
As for the course itself, I think it has all of the ingredients for a great golf course. It has character, variety, interest, and you could not find a course that is more fun to putt and chip on. The imagination that must go into the short game on this course is truly unbelievable. This is all centers around the most eccentric green complexes ever imagined. They have some of the wildest slopes and shelves, with plenty of creativity in their construction. The 2nd green has over 8 feet of fall in it from side to side, the 12th green is nearly 50 yards long, and the 1st and 9th greens defy explanation. As mentioned, the original design had vast expanses of sandy waste areas, as well as two strings of 'pearl necklace' bunkers that number into the teens as far as bunkers in a row. The course also has an element of blindness that captures the look and feel of a truly old world course.
I really love this course, and they don't even play one of the best holes on the course, the short 14th, on a regular basis. The old 14th, the 'two or twenty' hole, is used very infrequently having been replaced by a typical 1970's Frank Duane hole that is the current 3rd Hole. The old 14th is under 100 yards long, played to a tiny green that sits on a peninsula perched out over a 20 foot drop surrounding it on 3 sides. It looks like a Vicks cough drop with sand and gronkle all around it. It really is an amazing little hole that was considered too short, and abandoned in the early 1970's. The main part of our restoration plan is to restore this hole to play on an everyday basis.
As for Herbert Strong, I have only had the good fortune of visiting two of his courses, Inwood and Engineers. As a result, I do not feel qualified to rate his work. However, the work I have seen is very ambitious in its scale and its attempts to create unique and interesting golf holes. Attributes that would rank him very highly in my book."
Ran Morrissett:
"Still, given the praise that reigned down on Engineers throughout the 1920s and 1930s, one can only wish that club boards at Engineers will appreciate what they once had. As the black and white photographs show… plenty of photographic evidence exists to act as a blueprint for fairway expansion/mowing patterns, bunker scheme and green recapturing, and additional tree removal efforts. The property and routing are still in tact and fully restored, Engineers becomes one of the must-see original designs in the world of golf - short in length but long in design character like so many of the great inland UK courses such as West Sussex and Swinley Forest. And perhaps the great Herbert Strong would then eventually begin to get his due as well."
Tom Doak:
"The issue at Engineers is not about restoration at all, really ... it's that they don't like what they have which is basically pretty well preserved. They are bound and determined to change it because they think it's too severe, and good players are constantly telling them it's too severe.
One would like to tell them to just keep the greens at 8 on the Stimpmeter and not try to keep them at the same speeds as other area clubs because the greens don't work at 10 ... their greens might not even work at 9 ... but the members just think they've fallen behind the times and need "updating.""
"….When I spoke with the green chairman at Engineers, it was pretty clear that he had decided that certain greens had to be changed, and there were a couple of them that I could not imagine changing, without changing their character significantly. And I thought their character was worth preserving, so we didn't present a proposal for the work."
"…I did pass on doing any work at Engineers because it had to involve major softening of several noteworthy greens ... I'm sure Trip Davis did a fine job of that, I just didn't want to be the one who erased them."