For according to the 1931 edition of the highly reliable American Annual Golf Guide, Los Angeles County boasted a total of 14 first-rate 18-hole golf courses that no longer exist. That’s 14 full-sized layouts -- public and private -- that have dissolved into housing, airports, shopping malls and the like. Most of these courses were of real merit, several of the best being built by George Thomas and/or Billy Bell, the legendary architects responsible for such landmark courses as Riviera, Bel-Air and the Los Angeles Country Club.

What’s missing then, is an impressive body of work. Indeed, we can fairly say that a good number of prominent American cities have never had as many fine courses in total as the Los Angeles area has lost.

On the public side, the biggest losses surely were the East and West courses of Culver City’s Fox Hills Golf Club, mid-1920s creations adjacent to today’s Fox Hills Mall. These were two Thomas layouts befitting the finest of private clubs, with most holes routed through and around several mid-sized canyons.

Measuring nearly 7,000 yards when it was the site of the 1954 L.A. Open (won by Fred Wampler with a respectable score of 281) the East course had grown substantially from its 6,300-yard beginnings and was widely viewed as the better modern track. Curiously, the less-heralded West course (which began as the separate Baldwin Hills Golf Club) may have offered more truly first-class holes, especially its long and dangerous 225-yard 14th.

The West was never expanded over the decades, however, and measured only 6,440 yards at the time of the property’s 1960s development-related demise.

—Wexler, Daniel. “Lost World.” Los Angeles Times, 20 February 2003