Lido. added remarks by Darwin on Lido Competition

[Sean_Tully]

Guys here is a fascinating article just by the fact of the moldings and photos! Do not believe that I have seen this before? Love the routing/contour map! I have also included the top three place winning drawings for the Lido Competition. Enjoy.

Wonder if the other moldings were also photographed and who made them.












Here is the photos of the top three drawing for the Lido Competition from the August 1st 1914 issue of Country Life
Not sure how many have seen the other places?
Do we know of what happened to Mr. Edmondsun or Mr. MacIver?
1st Place


2nd Place


3rd Place


Tully

[RJ_Daley]

Is anyone impressed by Edmundson or McIver?  Not me so much....

[Patrick Kiser]

Sean,

How do you ever come across this stuff  ?  Amazing...  Thanks as always for sharing.

[Niall C]

Sean,

Fantastic stuff, thanks for posting. As a matter of interest, and I know that the Lido NLE, but what is there now ?

RJ

Personally I don't think the third place plan is all that bad even if it is relatievly crudely depicted. I'm not a fan of the 90 degree dogleg as depicted in the second plan but then I guess by now most golfers would be cutting the corner which would make it infinitely more interesting to play.

Niall

[JC Jones]

The Maciver is Cape-esque.

[Keith OHalloran]

Niall,
There is still a course there named Lido. It uses about half of the property that the original course used. It is my understanding that the club had to selll the ocean front property when the economy dictated. Lido boulevard had not been a road when the course was built, and is now a four lane road running East and West and comprises the border to the South of the course.

[Tom MacWood]

I've never seen that plan for Lido with topographic lines on it. That is especially interesting for a couple reasons, first because the course was completely man made and second because people have discussed trying to recreate the course or individual holes from the course, for example the famous Channel hole.

Sean
Is there any name on that map?

[Simon Holt]

Sean,

Fantastic stuff.  Slightly away from the thread but do you have more of the text about the new course that was being built in East Lothian?  The section next to the second place hole design.


Thanks,

Simon

[Tom MacWood]

Simon
I believe that was Longniddry. 

[Tyler Kearns]

Is anyone impressed by Edmundson or McIver?  Not me so much....

RJ,

I'm impressed by Edmondsun's drawing capability, not so much his design. It looks more Mackenzian than Mackenzie's plan, again, in style, not substance.

TK

[Tom_Doak]

Sean,

I agree with Tom MacWood, the fascinating part is that the grading topo is in the map ... I have never seen that before for Lido.  What magazine was this published in?

P.S.  If Macdonald posted this same design on GCA he would be crucified for having three of the short holes playing In the same direction.  But if amazes me how close to the other holes he crammed in 14 and 16.

[Peter Pallotta]

The 'sophistication' (not quite the right word) of the plans and the discourse surprises me; not to say that it should surprise me, only that it does.  This seems to me the most striking thing about that time, the NGLA-Pine Valley-Lido axis -- i.e. the 'self-conscious' (not quite the right word either) pursuit of gca excellence.  I can sort of see how, after the Depression and the Second World War, this approach could strike many as too 'precious', and not useful in or conducive to building (many) courses to popularize the game.   

Peter

[Patrick Kiser]

... for example the famous Channel hole.

Sharp Park had a pretty good one ... or two (e.g. 5th / 10th).

[George_Bahto]

Sean - Great job, as usual.

I like the photos of the individual hole models. I guess there was the master, full course model and then individual hole models as well.

It looks as though there are some changes - especially in bunkering.

Both this article and the one that appeared in Golf Illustrated were written in 1915. The Golf Ill artilce was written by Macdonald and included hole descriptions

Love the topos

[Tom_Doak]

George,

Is that first hole a version of the 15th at National?  Also, what is the model for the fifth?

I noticed on the ninth that the grading has a hill on the left much like the real hole we saw at Leven.

Still, the most sriking thing about the course is how tightly everything is packed together.  Look at the tee shot for #5, you just whistle one right past the 13th tee!  If Lido HAD survived, they would have had trouble making it work for the modern age of volume play and litigation.

[Dale Jackson]

George and Tom, is there anything in the models, maps and articles that may have made you think you would do anything different at Old MacDonald - changes to a hole, maybe a different inspiration/template?

[DMoriarty]

Also, what is the model for the fifth?

Cape, I think.

[Jim_Kennedy]

That's what #5 is labeled in George's book, although the 4th is "Channel" and this article calls it "Lagoon".

[Sean_Tully]

Here is the article with comments by Bernard Darwin. Due to the format of the page I have to do a quick stitch of the document so pardon my re-interpretation of MacKenzie's Lido hole! Refer to my original post for the original.

Tully

[TEPaul]

Sean:

Since you've posted some articles and information on The Lido which may not have been seen before on here, it may be a good time to rejuvenate the larger history and scope of what was going on with the The Lido back in 1914-1915 and on.

It has been discussed on here in the past but I'm not very good at searching the back pages so I hesitate to look for some of those old threads. I recall one in particular by David Moriarty that was entitled something like "Jumping the Shark?" If I understand the definition of that term correctly it indicates some act or event of over-reaching in some egregious way or event.

I don't think there was any question of that with The Lido ("Jumping the Shark"); it was a project in scope and particularly in timing (bad) that was mis-conceived for all kinds of reasons.

It may even be an interesting for you, a West Coast guy, as a parallel and analogy to the amazing evolution of The Pacific Development Company and Morse et al, and how he and his partners ended up muddling through and doing it right where his counterparts on the East Coast with the Lido Corporation just did not!

Wayne sent me an article from 1914 that reports the proposed cost of the entire Lido project and also some interesting people who were the principles and primary investors in the corporation. I don't know if the article is from a Philadelphia or New York newspaper but it does identify a couple of interesting Philadelphians who had to do with the development of Merion Ardmore and its course and HDC residential community attached to it on the west.

Maybe I can forward the article to Joe Bausch to post.

The coterie of people Macdonald dealt with in his life and architectural career is probably a lot smaller and tighter than most people realize! But what really strikes me about the Lido and Macdonald is that he seemed to go back to his small coterie of people abroad and the same MO he used with NLGLA (a magazine competition abroad) for some of his architectural ideas for The Lido while going to his tight coterie of Americans to finance it again.

[George_Bahto]

fm Tom Doak: “George,

“Is that first hole a version of the 15th at National? Also, what is the model for the fifth?”

Tom: In the Macdonald version of the Lido article, below the picture of the model, he lists the holes, yardages and the inspiration origin.

The 1st hole was 384 and the inspiration was, yes, the Narrow - 15-NGLA.

In the Lido version it looks as though he incorporated the two “narrowing” bunkers, left and right short of the green, with the front-short centerline bunker at NGLA. He has the narrowing bunkers set in on a sharp diagonal (tight towards the front as you approach the green - V” shaped, two hazards) which creates the same impact as the three bunkers short, left and right of 15-NGLA   


The 5th-Lido is, as TomMac and )Lefty) Jim Kennedy said, is the Cape at 378 (a pretty long version for them)


Tom, that hill on this Lido topo is a perfect example of what we saw at original 7-Leven, now 16 Lundin Links - a feature they never (?) used in that manner.

That also tells me that this is Macdonald input on the 10th. Raynor did not see the original and as far as I know neither CB, Raynor or Banks ever built a Leven hole with that mound location configuration.

Since we saw that iteration at Lundin Links, it really fascinates me how Macdonald turned those two mounds at Lundin into the single, large crossing mound at 17-National.

[George_Bahto]

Fm Dale Jackson:
“George and Tom, is there anything in the models, maps and articles that may have made you think you would do anything different at Old MacDonald - changes to a hole, maybe a different inspiration/template?”

Dale, no. We all knew what the inspiration hole strategies were about and we all had seen may versions of these holes, here and in the case of Doak and company, in Bermuda.

Me? There is absolutely nothing I would change at Old Macdonald. It was planned and pretty much built as planned and adjusted as necessary in the field (that’s where all the fun was).

What is most important is that we were committed that in NO WAY we would be building or build anything look like, anything these architects built before. This was not too easy because there are so many great versions of these holes still in existence and for Tom and Jim to come up with fresh holes with the same basic strategies, to me, was quite an accomplishment.

Also, the ground dictated the routing and in many cases, dictated the configuration of some of the holes, Tom was not exactly comfortable with this approach (fitting a course to a preconceived set of golf holes) but the results speak for the talents of Tom and Jim.

An aside about the Cape hole at Old Macdonald:

When Tom first showed me where the Cape hole would be I thought it fell in a nice place during the round and I could see the general configuration of the hole - especially the fairway and the dog-leg in the fairway. There was some concern about the outside bend in the dog-leg for a while (there was  large gorse section there and we had to worry about balls running thru the fairway into it - or pulled or hooked shots getting into it).

They showed me the inside of the dog-leg where you would be worrying about hazard but I could not “SEE” the green setting - they could - I could not.

I guess I was looking (in my mind’s eye) about a green set a bit high, jutting out into something with (perhaps) falloffs in front and behind. Well that was not what happened and in the end we ended up with Cape that most everyone seems to like very much     ...  (Shows you how much I know

[Sean_Tully]

Tom

Can't make out any name on the plan.

Tom D.

Of all the surprises, Vanity Fair. Feb 1915.

I have been through most of the golf magazines and find myself dredging through other society mags and automobile rags. Just found an amazing image of the 7th at Pebble from an old magazine called Motorland! Will post.

Will add some other articles when I find time.

Tully

[Neil_Crafter]

Sean
Nice find.
Darwin wrote regularly in Vanity Fair for a number of years. Amongst the 50 or more magazines and newspapers he wrote for.