East Lake was once a proud tradition. Now, thanks to a major repair job, it's able to showcase itself once again.

by Brett Avery

THE YOUNG MEN stare at notebooks, some scratching their heads while trying to decipher the instruction. So many dos and don'ts to remember and so little seems intertwined: where to stand, how to get the proper yardage, where not to walk. How will they ever reach their goal -- becoming caddies at a golf club recognized around the world -- if they are so confused over what to do next?

One block away residents look at their neighborhood, some scratching their heads while trying to decipher what happened. So many problems have arisen and all seem interconnected: increased crime, the presence of drugs, a lingering negative image around town. How will they ever reach their goal -- becoming a stable part of a city of Olympic proportions -- if they are so confused over what to do next?

There is no hidden symbolism in the city block which separates East Lake Golf Club and the public housing that dominates the neighborhood of Bob Jones' youth. Both course and community have seen better days. Within some vacant lots rusted automobiles hide among tall weeds, abandoned much as some Atlantans have written off these streets. But the people who work here are teaming with the people who play here to help East Lake's neighborhood achieve the glow of its salad days.

"If everybody cared about the neighborhood there would not be any problems," says Rebecca Dameron, immediate past president of the East Lake Residential Association. "Everybody would call the police and report criminals, everybody would clean up their yards. If people would not be afraid of working hard, we could accomplish some of these things."

Six decades ago East Lake was bucolic, the sprawl of downtown Atlanta still years and miles away. The club was home to some of the planet's best -- Jones; Watts Gunn, his opponent in the 1925 U.S. Amateur final; three-time U.S. Women's Amateur champ Alexa Stirling; later Charles Yates, the '38 British Amateur winner.

Three decades ago East Lake hosted a Ryder Cup match on a layout revamped by George Cobb. The city also was moving forward, preparing to erect public housing where East Lake's No. 2 course stood. The face would change; the neighborhood would remain.

The last three decades have not been kind to course or community. It is difficult to imagine East Lake's onetime remoteness to downtown, then a cluster of low buildings. It is now only minutes from the high-rises via Interstate 20, a luxury of 20th-century transportation that accelerated the flight to the suburbs and East Lake's decline.

The city built East Lake Meadows, the housing project, but that injected strife and heartache into a place where children had spent summers swimming in the club's expansive lake. To understand the neighborhood's plight, witness the Goodwill Industries headquarters within a 3-iron of a corner of club property -- not an option near any of the tony suburban clubs.

But the East Lake Residential Association marks its 20th anniversary this year with several newfound partners. Atlanta developer Tom Cousins, who purchased the club about two years ago for a price of $4.5 million, is realizing the dream of turning the club into a veritable shrine to Jones. When it reopens in early autumn, East Lake Golf Club will employ not carts but caddies, the young men who in late spring were scratching their heads trying to figure out the game's idiosyncracies.

More importantly, Cousins and his team, including many longtime club members, are tapping into corporate support that should assist Dameron and others revitalize a teetering neighborhood. In the last three years the association has seen attendance at its monthly meeting increase five-fold, and the effects of continuing to fight blight are becoming more visible.

"We are trying to do what government has tried without success to achieve many times before -- rehabilitate an urban area," Cousins told a group of visitors this spring. "They have had their chance. Now it is ours."

Cousins and his team know the neighborhood intimately. He can point out the home where he lived as youth, bordering the rectangular tract on which the course sits. So can Yates, who has worked behind the scenes as a complement to Cousins' public campaign; he will become club president upon its reopening. They both look at the crime and drugs and unemployment and see a neighborhood crying for help -- and few people responding.

"[City government] may have their ear turned a little more to us," Dameron sighs, "but it's a struggle. A lot of them say they are overworked and understaffed, but I'm tired of hearing that excuse, too."

It would be easy to mistake the golf club's renovation as the effort's centerpiece. Cousins brought in Rees Jones to blend Ross's design philosophy with today's equipment reality. And he set about renovating the clubhouse, tearing down additions which had been slapped onto the original structure while maintaining such touches as Bob Jones' old double locker.

Before Rees Jones arrived, East Lake was a jumble. Ross's routing was there, as were traces of his double greens -- half bentgrass for winter, the other bermuda for stifling summers. But the layout was punctuated by Cobb's flash bunkers, shallow imprints like giant spoons pushed into mashed potatoes -- in no manner a Ross feature.

"We've gone back to the long bunkers beside the greens," Jones says. "Ross's bunkers cut off access to the green from the side -- there was no gap in the sand. But that didn't matter because everybody walked onto the front of the green and walked off the back. Now we have carts and narrow walkways between bunkers."

With caddies, form can follow function in a reverse direction. But the form is possible because of the value of East Lake's terrain. In Ross's time architects were led to the best plots for miles around, where tees and green sites nearly staked themselves. A half-century later, when Cobb's template was Augusta National, most great parcels were occupied, not necessarily by golf courses.

By the time East Lake's neighborhood entered into its decline, course design slid with it into an era when designers were presented with erratic property and challenged to sculpt a masterpiece. In the last few years, though, the cycle has completed to uncovering classic style by lovingly massaging a gem.

Yet no matter how hard an architect strives, it is all but impossible to duplicate the original vision. For one, few courses have the luxury of detailed original plans or extensive photography. East Lake had a smattering of both, along with several long-term members with exceptional memories. But the land is inexorably changed by the addition and maturation of trees -- in East Lake's case, hundreds of pines planted in the mid-1950s.

"So many courses -- Pine Valley, Olympic -- had few or no trees when they were built," Jones notes. "Now they do. From a restoration standpoint, you don't know if Donald Ross would have intended to have trees (in certain locations). But they give you an opportunity to frame a hole, give it a classic style."

Nowhere is this more evident than East Lake's incoming nine, a calf-burning walk up and down a slope between the lake and the street on the property's eastern boundary. The uphill holes are muscular and well bunkered; the downhill ones require cautionary placement and exacting approaches. The round ends with the club's famed par 3 stretched to more than 220 yards into the prevailing breeze, a test of ability and endurance.

Nearly every hole returns to the boundary, a fence that in the past year has lost its barbed-wire topping. Someday soon, club members hope, they can lower the six-foot fence by half, further promoting a symbiotic feeling.

The homes have changed in appearance, but not architecture, from the time of the 1989 Walker Cup at nearby Peachtree Golf Club. They have shrugged off a dowdy look, and many have been sold to new residents. Real estate agents would call them starters, since they carry a slightly lower price tag due to their smaller size. The area contains Atlanta's first cinderblock home and the second-oldest residence in the city. Dameron is typical: She moved in nearly 10 years ago, drawn by the hardwood trees, and has no intention of leaving.

"Back in the '30s and '40s, this was a reasonable neighborhood and a very pretty part of Atlanta," Cousins recalls. "It wasn't ever the area of the super rich. It was a mixed income area, a nice area." Later on he notes another ingredient: pride.

Dameron and her fellow association members are "fighting every day" to instill that pride in East Lake's next generation. The neighborhood is about 70 percent black, has an abundance of churches and several small stores supported by the locals. People are sprucing up and keeping watch, especially for many of the elderly residents who cannot maintain their yards. The next step is a Community Development Block Grant to fix sidewalks and street lighting, a governmental joust the association lost in the '70s.

Dameron counts through the six objectives laid out last year with a city planner the club helped provide. The goals are all simplistic -- preserve the historic character of the neighborhood, promote the image of East Lake in a positive light. Which is the biggest obstacle?

"I would think my answer would be crime, but actually it is the apathy of the people," she says. "Some of these people are just struggling to survive, so we can't expect them to work five hours a week on this. But we need them to help."

In a few months the golf club will reopen. By then, the neophyte caddies will not be scratching their heads over rudimentary aspects of the game. If Dameron and her fellow residents have their way, it's only a matter of time before the whole neighborhood stops scratching and starts climbing back to a place of prominence in Atlanta.

Rees Jones went to East Lake with the intention of refining Donald Ross's original work. Above: The first hole. Opposite page, top: A look at the "old" East Lake says one thing for certain: It hardly resembles the "new" East Lake (opposite page, bottom) that will open later this summer.

The East Lake course may be new, but the neighborhood is not. The vision shared by Tom Cousins (left) and Charles Yates includes a strong caddie program; in fact, training is already under way.