Banyan Golf Club

Banyan Golf Club in West Palm Beach was designed by Joe Lee and opened in 1973 as a par-72 layout measuring 7,150 yards. Lee, one of Florida's most prolific course architects, created a demanding layout on the flat South Florida terrain, using strategic water placements and well-bunkered greens to compensate for the absence of natural elevation change.

Banyan Golf Club came into existence in the early 1970s through the collective determination of a group of Palm Beach County golfers who learned that the course where they regularly played was slated for conversion to a condominium development. Rather than accept the loss of their playing ground, a Committee of Fifteen men organized with a shared and clearly defined ambition: to build a private club that they would own outright, governed by members rather than developers or management companies. The committee secured 80 acres of abandoned shell-mine pits west of Interstate 95 in West Palm Beach — land that most developers had dismissed as unworkable given the excavated terrain and the absence of trees — and in 1972 they commissioned architect Joe Lee to design something worthwhile from it. Lee, who was among the most active and productive designers in Florida during the development boom of the 1960s and 1970s, recognized the hidden potential that others had overlooked. The former mining operations had left the property with dramatic elevation changes — as much as 36 feet above the surrounding terrain in places — along with a series of deep lakes formed in the pits themselves.

These features were assets to a golf course designer working in a state otherwise characterized by relentless flatness. What the site genuinely lacked was trees: the land was almost entirely bare of canopy when Lee arrived to conduct his initial survey. Lee's solution to the tree problem was both practical and imaginative. He arranged to rescue thousands of mature trees that were scheduled for destruction in the path of Interstate 95's southward construction advance, having them carefully extracted and trucked to the Banyan site, where they were planted strategically along the routing. The trees were large enough on arrival to establish immediate visual character, and as they matured over the following decades they created the shaded, wooded atmosphere that now defines the course.

Joe Lee later identified Banyan as his personal favorite among all the courses he designed — a statement that speaks to the creative satisfaction he found in transforming an improbable site into something genuinely beautiful and challenging. The course opened in 1973 to strong reviews within the South Florida golf community. The elevation changes that Lee incorporated — unusual in a region otherwise characterized by flat coastal terrain — create varied lies and sightlines throughout the routing. Players must adjust to uphill, downhill, and sidehill lies on a course where most Florida golfers expect level ground. The mining lakes add both aesthetic beauty and strategic consequence, particularly on approach shots where the distances required to carry water across specific angles are precise and unforgiving.

Architect Kipp Schulties undertook renovation work at Banyan in subsequent years, refining bunker shapes, updating playing surfaces, and addressing infrastructure improvements while preserving the essential character and strategic framework that Lee had established. The renovation respected the founding vision of the member committee: a private club built on merit and difficulty, not on resort-style amenities or development profits. The club has remained member-owned throughout its entire history — a purely private institution that has resisted the various corporate ownership models that transformed much of South Florida golf during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The founding spirit of self-determination, expressed in those original fifteen men's decision to build a club rather than accept the loss of their playing ground, has persisted through more than five decades of operation. It remains today one of the more respected private golf experiences in the Palm Beach County market, distinguished by its elevation changes, its lake-studded terrain, and the long history of member governance that gives the club its particular character.