Charleston is a city that knows how to keep a thing and dress it up again, and Charleston Municipal may be its plainest proof on grass. The locals call it Muni, and the name fits a place that never pretends to be anything other than the city's own. It sits around the corner from the Country Club of Charleston, one of the two world-class courses Seth Raynor designed here in the early 1920s along with Yeamans Hall. Raynor's influence can be felt throughout the region, and now the public course carries some of it too. Muni was built in 1929 and became the stomping ground for a public golf crowd that has always been hungry for a game. But the land is low, and low land in Charleston answers to the weather. A portion of the course routinely flooded in heavy rains, and the course was suffering from misuse as well. Local architect Troy Miller stepped in with an idea, and he and his team proposed and carried it out. They improved the drainage so the course could better resist the water. Then they did something braver. They restyled the holes with Raynor characteristics, so that the city's bustling public course would reflect the character of some of the best golf in the area. The ground here is extremely flat, and flat ground gives an architect nothing for free. Like an actual Raynor course, Muni builds its own intrigue with extremely bold green complexes and features. The catch, and the charm, is scale. These are Raynor ideas built to the size and budget of a municipal course, as if someone had folded a grand old plan into a pocket and carried it across town. The round reads like a set of familiar names. It opens on a Double Plateau at the 1st. The 4th is an Eden, the 6th a Punchbowl, the 8th a Biarritz. The back nine strings its templates close together: a Redan at 11, a Cape at 12, a Road at 13, a Short at 14, a Maiden at 15. Each of them demands extreme precision on the approach. When the pin is tucked on a shelf, the green becomes a series of small rooms, and only one of them is yours. Dry spells make it sharper still. Rainstorms still roll in off the ocean, and the course is still susceptible to them, but give Muni dry conditions and proper maintenance and it often turns into a lightning-fast test, the ball running out across those shelves. That is the tension at the heart of the place. The same low ground that once flooded so routinely can now play firm and quick, and on any given week you may meet one face or the other. The course carries both its history and its revival in the soil. Yet for all the work done on the course, the clubhouse stayed as it was. It is still a simple pro shop and a snack shack. The staff are all locals who have been on site for many years. The local men's club, the Little Rascals, has been playing every Friday for decades. On Saturday morning at 7:00 sharp, the same group of gentlemen gathers on the porch with their coffee, as fixed as the tide tables. There are courses in Charleston that feel like private worlds. Muni feels like the city itself, built on its low ground, shaped in the image of its finest golf, and still bustling with the people who call it theirs. It is a public course wearing an old master's clothes, and it wears them as if it was always meant to.