Hillcrest Golf & Country Club
The Hillcrest Golf and Country Club was a 92-acre private country club located off of Oxmoor Road in Birmingham's Glen Iris neighborhood, on the present site of the Palisades shopping center.
The country club was an outgrowth of the Phoenix Club, which had been founded in 1883 by Birmingham's Reform Jewish community, predominantly those of German descent. That organization became dormant before the 1920s. In 1922 Hugo Marx, Leo Kayser, and G. Goldman led a group which purchased the property for $40,000 and developed a 9-hole golf course and clubhouse building. When the city of Homewood was incorporated in 1926 it abutted the southern edge of the club property at Oxmoor Road.
In 1957 the club commissioned architect Lawrence Whitten to design a new clubhouse to accommodate 250 people, and assessed each member $1,000, which was to be held in trust and returned if the proposed new building and its furnishings could not be secured for less than $300,000.
Hillcrest merged with the newer and more conservative Fairmont Country Club, serving the Eastern European Jewish community, on May 20, 1968 to become the Pine Tree Country Club.
The land was also the former site of the Zamora Shrine Temple before it became the present day shopping center.
Golf course demolition
All photographs are from 1986.
Looking southeast
Looking southeast
Looking southwest
References
- Elovitz, Mark H. (1974) A Century of Jewish Life in Dixie: The Birmingham Experience. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press ISBN 0817369015
- Summe, Sheryl Spradling. (2001). Homewood: The Life of a City. Homewood, AL: Friends of the Homewood Public Library.
- Brook, Lawrence (2008) "Birmingham, Alabama" in Encyclopedia Judaica. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise - accessed December 21, 2018