In December 1896 a group of cricketers laid out a handful of golf holes at 52nd Street and Chester Avenue in southwest Philadelphia. The club was incorporated in 1900 as the Belmont Golf Association and moved twice within the city. It took its lasting name from a chief of the Lenape who had once occupied the farmhouse it used as a clubhouse. Aronimink roughly translates to "place of water." In 1926 the club bought 300 rolling acres in Newtown Square. The club hired Donald Ross at the height of his career. The course opened on Memorial Day 1928, crowned by a Tudor clubhouse by Charles Barton Keen and Franklin D. Edmonds. Ross had meant it to be his masterpiece, and when he returned in 1948 he said, "I intended to make this my masterpiece, but not until today did I realize that I built better than I knew." The land does most of the talking. The routing follows a steady rhythm of ridge and valley, dipping in and out of a central bowl, so that a level lie is a rare gift. The outward nine bends through demanding doglegs. At the 7th the approach must carry a deep bunker guarding the front of the green. The 8th drops downhill to a narrow putting surface and ranks among the toughest one-shotters on the card. The inward nine opens from an elevated tee at the 454-yard 10th, the fairway pitched right to left, with water guarding the front-left of the green. The 17th, about 187 yards, crosses a lake. The 18th climbs some 436 yards back to the clubhouse. Sidehill, downhill, ridge to ridge, uphill: the variety is deliberate, and the par-70 course now reaches past 7,200 yards. Ross meant the greens to be the principal defence of par. They are crowned and internally contoured, with bold spines and ridges cutting across them, giving a wavy surface and many hole locations that demand a precise approach. Their character reaches back to 1928. Their story belongs to a longer one of loss and return. Ross's bunkering was extravagant, more than 190 hazards in all. From the 1950s, William Gordon, Dick Wilson, George Fazio and Robert Trent Jones simplified it, moving bunkers closer to the greens or removing them from play. In 2003 Ron Prichard worked from Ross's drawings, returning the greens to their original shapes and sizes and bringing back the characteristic bunkering. Later, old photographs of the course came to light, and the club asked Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner to go further. Studying construction footage, Hanse "became convinced this was a special place to (Ross) and he was changing (his plans) as he went along. Where he drew one bunker, he put in three or four." Hanse has wondered whether J.B. McGovern, one of Ross's most trusted construction assistants and the club's green chairman at the time, inspired the clustered style that Ross then approved. Those clusters are unusual in Ross's work. The restoration recovered nearly 30,000 square feet of putting surface and pushed the bunker count past a hundred, perhaps beyond 170, and the course wears a menacing look. Hanse's work was finished in spring 2018, ahead of that September's BMW Championship. Aronimink is the only venue to have staged all three of the PGA of America's rotating major championships, and the PGA Championship is set to return in May 2026, bringing the Wanamaker Trophy back for the first time since Gary Player won here in 1962. After nearly a century of alterations and recoveries, the course stands closer to what Ross built than at any time since it opened, a steady, demanding test from the 1st hole to the 18th.