Suburban at Suburban Golf Club

Suburban Golf Club in Union, New Jersey, is an A.W. Tillinghast design that dates to the architect's prolific period in the 1920s. Tillinghast, who created many of the finest courses in the metropolitan New York area during this era, routed Suburban through rolling terrain characteristic of northern New Jersey's suburban landscape. The course reflects his signature design principles: strategic bunkering, thoughtful green complexes, and holes that reward accurate shotmaking over pure distance.

The layout occupies property that provides natural elevation changes and mature tree-lined corridors. Tillinghast's work here demonstrates his ability to craft engaging golf on parcels that lack dramatic topography, using subtle contours and carefully positioned hazards to create interest and challenge. The greens feature the kind of internal movement and defendable pin positions typical of his designs from this period.

Suburban Golf Club operates as a private facility and has served its membership for nearly a century. The course has undergone various modifications over the decades, as most Golden Age designs have, though it retains the fundamental character of a Tillinghast routing. Its location in Union places it within the dense network of classic courses that populate northern New Jersey, a region that benefited greatly from the design work of Tillinghast and his contemporaries during the 1920s boom in American golf course construction.