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The Dunedin Country Club

Dunedin Country Club

Picture this:

You are a developer in Dunedin, Fla., and you have a vision about a new housing development. You want to attract people from up north who may want to relocate to a warmer, sunnier climate.

So you buy a big tract of land and you subdivide it into house lots. Right in the middle of it you leave plenty of space for a golf course. And just to make sure you make the course really attractive and interesting, you hire one of the greatest living golf course architects to design it.

Sounds like a pretty contemporary scenario, right?

In this case, however, it was not.  All of this took place in the 1920s. The subdivision included Dunedin’s Fairway Estates, and the golf course was the Donald Ross-designed Dunedin Country Club.

This story starts in the early years of the 20th century, when Baron Otto Quarles arrived in Florida from Europe. He bought a huge tract of land north of Dunedin and built a large mansion on the site, but within a few years he lost interest and relocated to the other side of Tampa Bay, in Tampa.

About 20 years later, a developer acquired the land and announced very ambitious plans. Two golf courses, a casino and more than 6,000 home sites were part of the scheme. But then came the great Florida real estate bust of 1929, and the project went bankrupt.

Before that happened, however, Donald Ross was retained to design the golf course. Ross was a native of Scotland who designed more than 300 U.S. golf courses during his career. He was based in North Carolina and designed many courses there, but Florida was fertile ground for his talents, too. Ross-designed golf courses are highly prized; today, fewer than 20 Donald Ross courses survive in Florida.

The Depression took its toll on the course. By the mid-1930s it was in need of major repairs and maintenance. In 1938, the city of Dunedin obtained ownership of the course. Money was invested in the course, and golfers began using it again in 1938.

A real break for the course happened in 1945, when it was selected to become the home course of the PGA of America. The PGA leased the club and made Dunedin its national headquarters. That relationship lasted until 1962, when the PGA moved to another location in Palm Beach Gardens/

During those years the course was played by some of the greatest name in golf — Ben Hogan, Sam Snead. Bobby Jones and Babe Zaharias among them.
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The Dunedin Country Club has been going through some financial and management issues lately. Here’s a link to a story in the St. Petersburg TIMES:

http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/article1017449.ece

Tags: country club, Dunedin, real estate

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 4:25 am and is filed under Dunedin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1. Mike said at July 20th, 2009 at 6:39 am

   Like many of these old clubs that are absorbed by municipalities when they are no longer profitable for the owners, they are at the mercy of the city administration and their endless committees. While they argue about what to do the property continues to fall from grace and it eventually becomes another Parks and Rec albatross.
   If these people were good at Golf Course Management, they would not have chosen to be part of city government. They would be out earning a handsome living doing something constructive and operating a profitable business instead of bleeding the constituency as they sit around conference tables and decide how to further sodomize the taxpayers.
   I love golf and have played many courses, that are both private and public owned and by far, the private course are better maintained, profitable operated and in general a better place to play golf.
   That being said, public courses have their place. If you want to go out and play the game without having to take a second mortgage or cash in your kids college fund for membership and monthly bar tab, municipal courses fit the bill. You don’t expect it to be on par with the private clubs and generally you are not disappointed. At public courses you can get fleeced at the pro shop, you can get a hot dog and maybe a beer before heading to the back nine and you can do it all for far less then your Financial Advisor or x-wives lawyers are paying to do the very same thing down the road.
   The problem seems to occur when the club starts to fail to keep it’s head above water and the city goes into “Panic Management Mode”, as they often do with everything. The initial idea is to throw more money at the project without really investigating why it’s already losing money. Sometimes more money just isn’t the answer. It may be time to cash in on the only asset of the facility and do what is best for the community. Sell it and move on to further beautification of the city. You can keep the area around the lake for a nice walking park, so you can go home at night feeling good about doing something “Green”, and then house the rest. Get back to the idea of affordable housing for the next generation of kids, who will undoubtedly have trouble enough finding affordable housing with what’s left of their paycheck after taxes are deducted. But that is another story. Hey, don’t get me started.

   Mike Rieker

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