When engaged to work on an old course are you able to exert influence upon your client, in other words could you advise the client, or try to convince a client, that restoration/preservation would be the best in the long run from golfing and economic standpoint?
That depends on the client, of course.
My history with the course may provide a bit of background. We were approached by the green chairman at North Shore many years ago, and spent a day there interviewing for the job of consultant. We didn't take the job then. I thought the course was something of a mess, and the committee was entirely splintered as to their opinions of the course and what ought to be done. I thought they would probably just argue a lot and never do much with it.
They hired another architect -- I think Ron Forse worked there for a while, and George Bahto as well. Everything they did was under the guise of restoration, though it was a small, incremental project; they certainly didn't spend $2.5 million on it. Maybe those guys did not do research to your satisfaction, either [though, as an aside, it's funny to think that anybody still thought it was a Tillinghast course with George B. working there]. My take was that they were trying reasonably well to restore the course, though the shaping work was not quite up to the design ideas.
So, in essence, they had already tried to restore the course, and what was the result? The club was bankrupt. The restoration efforts didn't cause the bankruptcy; from what I've heard, poor financial management of the food & beverage was dragging them down, and losing a bunch of members to the Bernie Madoff ponzi was the knife in the back. But their restoration efforts also did not attract new members at all.
When Mr. Zucker called, I was reluctant to look at the project because I remembered the course and thought it had limited potential. But he's also one of the nicest people you would ever want to meet, and he said he would give me a free hand to do whatever I thought was best -- which was a lot different situation from working for the club's green committee! I had only one person to please, and he is not a member of Golf Club Atlas. At the same time, I had the responsibility to make sure Mr. Zucker was not wasting the money he spent to save the course or to work on it, which is something most people here never have to think about. That's not got much to do with old aerial photographs ... that's about delivering a course that is appealing for people who might buy a new membership. I just don't think a restoration would have cut it. You are welcome to disagree with that if you want, but I don't think there is any more point in my discussing it with you.
P.S. An interesting parallel: just three or four years before this I looked at the job at Engineers, just down the road. Now, THAT was a course that I thought deserved a true restoration. It's unique, and though I have not seen much of Herbert Strong's work, I have to believe it is one of his two or three best works. But their committee wanted to soften the greens for modern play. I was tempted to take the job and try to convince them otherwise, but after talking with the green chairman, decided he was not going to be convinced. So, they hired another architect and softened some of the greens ... and now they are pretty close to bankrupt, too. Is there a moral to this story? Maybe it's just a bad time to be running an older golf club in New York! As for me, I follow my conscience wherever it takes me; but it pains me to think that some smart people believe these questions should always deliver the same verdict.
P.P.S. One more note. I think it is much harder to seriously consider restoring a 1915 course than a 1925 course. Most 1915 courses were just barely 6,000 yards from the back tees, and probably like North Shore in that they have already been lengthened to the extent the property allows. No architect in 1915 was writing about the need to provide "elasticity" to get the course up to 6600 or 7000 yards someday. And, while I would love to build a 6000 yard course on my own someday to prove it can provide everything most golfers want, it would be a very risky business move, and I'm 0-for-30 on finding a client who would let me try. I really can't see how trying to restore a golf course to that length would work out any better.