A Community and Course
Come Roaring Back
Joseph M. Bartholomew Municipal Golf Course
New Orleans, La.
Date: March 7, 2019
Greens fee: $38 (weekday)
I’ve always wanted to be one of those people who’s head-over-heels in love with New Orleans. The truth, though, is that for most of my life it’s never been quite my speed. The traffic is a nightmare, and the French Quarter is chaos. The older I’ve gotten, though, the more it’s grown on me. Outside the French Quarter, there are terrific (and lower-key) neighborhoods, and of course the food is second to none. I’ve come to treat New Orleans the way I treat some of my relatives: focus on what you like, and if you keep the visit brief, then you’ll enjoy yourself enough to overlook the headache you leave with.
There is an unapologetic quirkiness to the Gentilly neighborhood embracing Joseph Bartholomew.
There’s also the underdog factor, for which I am a sucker. Fourteen years after the worst natural disaster in American history, New Orleans is coming back. There is still much to be done — ten years after Hurricane Katrina, the city’s population of African Americans was still down 30 percent from pre-storm levels, and its levels of income inequality are obscene. But New Orleans is off the mat. Everybody loves a fighter.
The city’s Gentilly neighborhood, and Joseph M. Bartholomew Municipal Golf Course therein, are representative of the comeback. When the London Avenue Canal levee failed in 2005, more than 80 people died in this neighborhood alone. The damage to the golf course was, rightly, a secondary concern — but like the damage everywhere else, it was catastrophic.
Today, new homes have been built; there is an energy to the neighborhood. And Joseph Bartholomew has come along for the ride. It took six years and a $9 million renovation, but the course reopened in 2011; its impressive conditioning makes it a deserving centerpiece of the community.
It’s an effort worthy of the course’s creator. Joseph Bartholomew was an African-American golf course architect in an era when people without white skin were seldom welcomed to golf courses at all, much less to design them. But Bartholomew studied under Seth Raynor in New York in the early 1920s and returned home to lay out a number of tracks — including Pontchartrain Golf Course, which opened in 1956 as the only New Orleans course available to black golfers during segregation. Bartholomew died in 1971; eight years later, Pontchartrain was renamed for him.
. . .
On the back nine, a jail so lovely that you don’t mind being in it.
Joseph Bartholomew is not an elaborate track. Its main defense is the convergence of its length (6,380 yards from the white tees, and more than 6,800 from the tips) and its ponds (I counted seven, no doubt intended to mitigate against flooding, and rightly so). Usually, courses relying on length and water don’t do it for me. But like New Orleans, there is something about this place. A great municipal golf course drapes itself in the fabric of its community; it complements the neighborhood’s vibe instead of feeling like it was forced in. Joseph Bartholomew accomplishes that in spades. Its conditioning is genuinely impressive for its price point, but it still wears just enough scruff to feel authentic. It is adorned with beautiful old live oaks (which, apparently, have a high tolerance for flooding), and its largest pond’s centerpiece is a wading bird rookery full of egrets. It is unmistakably New Orleans, without anything feeling manufactured about it (not that I have anywhere else in mind).
When Joseph Bartholomew opened in 1956, it was known as Pontchartrain Golf Course, and it was the only course in New Orleans available to black golfers. In 1979, the course was renamed for its African-American architect.
Right out of the gate, the course forces you to start dealing with its length: its first four holes consist of two long par 4s, a long-ish par 4 (at my length, anyway), and a long par 5. The rest of the front nine is less arduous, but then the ponds start coming into play: the green at the short par-3 fifth has water on three sides, and a pond runs along the inside of the par 4 seventh’s dogleg-left fairway (making it easy to pull one into a watery grave, which I very nearly did).
The eighth is another short par 3, with water deceptively distant to the left; from the tee, it doesn’t look dangerously close, but the bank between the green and the hazard is so steep that, if your ball doesn’t hold the putting surface, it’s going for a swim (trust me). I dropped, bladed a chip over the green (where, at least, it was dry), flubbed another chip, and then putted God knows how many times until the ball was in the hole. Two holes later, I realized that I’d left my wedge next to the green; I briefly contemplated abandoning it permanently (“Do you really need it? How well do you hit it, anyway?”).
On a windy day, the par-3 14th hole can play a full half-roll longer than its length.
As you come up the 10th fairway, the back nine opens in front of you, and essentially every hole is visible. Thus by happy accident I was positioned ideally to see two kids run from off the course onto the 14th hole and begin to joyfully toilet-paper a greenside tree. Perhaps 30 seconds later, a nearby cadre of old men took notice and gave chase on their golf carts; the kids easily outran them, laughing as they fled. I was wrong: this is the best city.
The 14th was Joseph Bartholomew’s funniest hole, but the 15th is its best. The fairway on the medium-length par 5 (497 yards from the white tees, 525 from the back) is wide, with more than enough room to avoid the water running along the left. The hole finishes by curving sharply left toward the water, but with enough room to the right of the green that you can avoid bringing water into play if you choose — but this safer route effectively takes birdie (and probably even par, if your short game looks anything like mine) out of the picture. If you want to score, then you have to take on the water.
The wading bird rookery is the centerpiece of the pond that helps make No. 15 the course’s best hole.
After blistering my drive on the 18th, I walked toward my ball with a certain satisfaction: I hadn’t scored particularly well, but I was going to finish in three hours — and, on a course full of water hazards, I hadn’t lost a ball all day (which is not the same thing as saying that I hadn’t put a ball in the water). I smiled, silently congratulated myself, and pulled out that wedge again. I chunked the approach and watched by ball dive into the very last pond on the course. Suddenly my visit with this eccentric new family member had lasted just long enough.
. . .
When done right, municipal golf courses are America’s best golf experiences. They are the truest representations of a city and its people that the game offers. They don’t have to be immaculately maintained, and they don’t have to be perfectly designed; but they should be affordable and entertaining enough to be a place you’d play every day — because, for many golfers in that city, those courses are where they play every day.
Joseph Bartholomew checks all those boxes. It’s a walk around a resurgent neighborhood in an underdog city, laced with the bad and good history that New Orleans carries with it. There is something more important than golf represented here. Less than a generation ago, disaster came bursting through a levee break not far from here, bringing death and misery on a scale that would be unimaginable if we hadn’t all watched it happen. But this golf course came back. The neighborhood is coming back, too. And if this place can be made right, then maybe the rest of New Orleans can be, too.