Devereux Emmet

Devereux Emmet was born at Pelham, New York, on 11 December 1861 into a prosperous and cultivated family. He earned an arts degree from Columbia in 1883 and then studied law, but landscape and sport became his real passions. During a visit to North Berwick in 1884, he discovered British golf and observed how holes appeared to emerge from dunes and natural movement. The experience preceded the organised rise of American golf by several years. Emmet was an accomplished horseman and hunter. His ability to read land came as much from outdoor life as from study. During the 1890s he was associated with the Garden City Company and received the opportunity to lay out Island Golf Links across the Long Island plain. Opened in 1897 and later expanded, it became Garden City Golf Club. Walter Travis subsequently transformed it, but the original routing and establishment of golf on the property belong to Emmet. A friend of Charles Blair Macdonald, Emmet assisted with travels and surveys preceding National Golf Links of America, although Macdonald and Seth Raynor were the principal authors. Meanwhile he developed the most prolific portfolio of New York’s Golden Age. St. George’s, the original Congressional Blue, Schuyler Meadows, Hartford, Cape Cod and Bethpage Green are among principal associations. His architecture is commonly described as naturalistic. Emmet used existing contours, sought changes of direction and avoided spectacular earthmoving. Early work sometimes retained nineteenth-century cross hazards, but his thinking evolved toward bunkers placed to influence line and angle. Sequence mattered greatly, particularly strong finishing holes capable of deciding a match near the clubhouse. Alfred Tull joined him from 1924 and contributed to later commissions. Emmet also remained a strong amateur competitor. He died at Garden City on 30 December 1934. His legacy was sometimes obscured by Travis’s remodelling and Macdonald’s theories, yet he was among the first Americans to understand that architecture should begin with existing ground and the continuity of an entire round.