Hilltop Public Golf Links
From "Fore! Gone. Minnesota's Lost Golf Courses, 1897-1999,"
by Joe Bissen, published 2014
Bang it off the tower
Hilltop Public Golf Links
City: Columbia Heights
County: Anoka
Dates: 1926-46
(Above: Hilltop Public Golf Links, sketched by the late Mike Rak, former standout Hilltop golfer. Photo credit: Peter Wong)
(This story includes revisions made in July 2020.)
It’s a radiant Sunday morning in July 2012, and 91-year-old Mike Rak is in a familiar place. He’s on the golf course.
Sort of.
Underfoot, there is asphalt, not bentgrass. Alongside, split-levels, not flagsticks. There isn't a tee box or two-tiered green in sight – and there hasn’t been for 65 years. 
Rak (pronounced “Rock”) is riding shotgun in an SUV turning onto Fairway Drive in the northern Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights. As the vehicle completes its turn, Rak's memory is jogged. He goes back in time.
“See that? There’s a tower by the 12th green,” he says.
To his left, behind a row of houses, beyond a chain-link fence, across a service road that borders the property of the Minneapolis Water Works and up a three-foot rise, is a round, brick tower with a cone-shaped, metal roof, about 25 feet tall and 15 feet in diameter.
“The 12th hole was 160 yards,” Rak says. “Where the tower was, balls would hit off that tower and go on the green. … The green was right back of this house there.”
In his mind’s eye, Rak is back on his old stomping grounds: Hilltop Public Golf Links, born in the 1920s, deceased 1946, occupying 150 acres or so in the northwest corner of Columbia Heights. Rak caddied at Hilltop in the 1930s and played there in the 1940s.
The house to which Rak refers, and its back yard, now own squatter’s rights to the old 12th green at Hilltop. From the street, neither Rak nor the SUV driver can see the slightest evidence that anyone ever hopped on the bogey train and finished 4-4-5-5-6-5-5 anywhere near here.
In this part of Columbia Heights, there is an almost standard response when residents are asked if they know about the neighborhood's history:
There was a golf course here?
Yep, there was. Most likely, nobody alive remembers it as well as Rak.
So, Mike, true confessions: Did you ever bounce one off the tower and onto the green?
(Right: Minneapolis Star article from April 27, 1943)
Rak smiles.
“Yeah. Everyone did.”
The brick towers near Hilltop's old 12th green are technically referred to as gatehouses. A handful of them dot the grounds of the Columbia Heights Ultrafiltration Plant, which processes up to 70 million gallons of Mississippi River water daily, makes it potable, and sends it downhill to nearby Minneapolis.
The Hilltop golf course wrapped around the grounds of the current Ultrafiltration Plant and an adjacent, previously existing, plant in an upside-down “L” shape. This, incidentally, was news to a supervisor at the Minneapolis Water Department, which operates the plant. The supervisor, answering an inquiry about the gatehouses, asserts in a voicemail message that “there may have been an employee who went up there and swung a club up there once in the past, but it’s really not a golf course; I don’t believe it ever was.”
Yeah, right. And Mike Rak never hit a 7-iron pin-high.
The SUV turns right, eastbound now on 49th Avenue Northeast.
“You see a straight line here; this is 49th,” Rak says. “In other words, this was the 15th fairway. … The 15th green was right here. Fifteen was a drivable par 4.”
The SUV is at the southern edge of Albert A. Kordiak Park. A parking lot occupies part of what was the 15th fairway. A small restroom stands within probably 50 feet of where the 15th green was. Where once a Hilltop golfer’s putting stunk, now … well, never mind.
Just beyond the restroom is the corner of a marsh, its shoreline thick with trees and brush. It is the southern edge of Highland Lake, which Rak knows as Peck’s Lake. Rak and his pals used to hunt ducks and pheasant nearby. Rak also used to tee off on Hilltop’s 16th hole here.
Couldn’t happen now. Today, a good drive, if it managed to sneak through the thicket and clear the lake, might land in somebody's backyard begonia bed.
(Right: Clifford Bjork near Highland Lake, also known as Peck’s Lake. Photo credit: Jim Bjork)
Tough lie. Try to pick it clean without clipping too many petals.
Rak, undaunted by the sight of the old Hilltop Golf Course paved here and overgrown there, describes the 16th.
“After 15, you walked to the left, and you hit across the lake, straight, 600 yards,” Rak says. “That was the longest hole in town then. This one went all the way up to Stinson Boulevard. You had to carry the ball over a hundred yards (off the tee). It was 615 or 620 yards long.” (An old scorecard lists its length as 510 yards, though an estimate based on a modern-day map indicates it might have been in the 550-yard range.)
The 16th green was at the northeast corner of Hilltop Golf Course and close to the very northeast corner of Columbia Heights. A 1947 aerial map indicates that the green was within a few yards of what is now the intersection of Stinson and 5th Street Northwest.
The SUV heads south. The air is rare up here, relatively speaking. This is one of the highest points in the Twin Cities area – 1,065 feet above sea level at the base of the Columbia Heights water tower, which stands between the former 17th green and 18th tee at Hilltop GC. The roadway names in this neighborhood attest to the elevation: Matterhorn Drive, Khyber Lane, Rainier Pass, Innsbruck Parkway.
Downhill from here: No. 18 at Hilltop, a 370-yard par 4, descended back to the clubhouse. The 18th tee “had a nice view of Minneapolis,” former Hilltop caddie Chet Latawiec recalled in Irene Parsons’ book “Columbia Heights: Bootstrap Town.”
Today, Minneapolis is not visible from the water tower. Houses and treetops are.
Latawiec, incidentally, was among a group of gifted golfers who played Hilltop. 
The late founder and namesake of Chet’s Shoes in Columbia Heights, he won a state junior boys championship and two state public links championships and qualified for the U.S. public links championship 17 times.
(Right: Aerial photo from 1938. Photo credit: University of Minnesota's John Borchert Map Library)
He is a member of the Minnesota Golf Association Hall of Fame. Rak, a welder, played in the national public links four times and won a Minnesota senior public links championship (1977), a state senior four-ball and a state senior masters. He has eight holes in one. Rak's brother John was a long hitter who once played No. 1 man for the University of Minnesota, and his other brother Joe played in three U.S. Public Links Championships.
Then there were John and Bill Lakotas, fine shotmakers whose family owned a hog farm near the 17th hole at Hilltop. John was a three-time state public links champion. The Lakotases perhaps were better at golf than animal control. Rak sketched out and passed along a remarkably detailed, in-scale map of Hilltop on a manila folder that included this notation near the 17th, referencing the Lakotas farm:
“Watch out for wild hogs.”
As adept as the Hilltop crew was, the best player to navigate the course was an outsider. Wally Ulrich, an Austin, Minn., native, served briefly as the Hilltop pro in the mid-1940s before playing the PGA Tour in the late 1940s and 1950s. Steve Walters, a longtime manager at nearby Gross and Columbia golf clubs in nearby northeastern Minneapolis, recalled that the Hilltop regulars, gifted as they were, never could get over the way Ulrich commanded the ball on Hilltop’s elevated greens.
Rak agreed.
“He’d hit a wedge,” Rak said, “and that son of a buck would back ’em up, and we’d hit the same shot and go over the green.” 
(Right: 2201 45th Ave NE from 1967. Photo credit: City of Columbia Heights)
The Hilltop clubhouse no longer stands, but across an alley, the course manager’s residence does. It is a tall, squarish house at the northeast corner of Chatham Road and 45th Avenue Northeast. In the Hilltop days, Rak said, a stone archway extended over what is now Chatham and led to the clubhouse.
“There were no homes no place here,” Rak says, looking over an area that now is nothing but homes, yards and streets. “The driving range was right next to where that second house is, and it went to Stinson.” Between the manager's residence and the driving range was an open-air reservoir with wooden banks at a 45-degree angle that held water used to irrigate the golf course.
Hilltop’s front nine traversed the interior of the course grounds, where Rak says, you couldn’t hit a ball out of bounds. The back nine bordered the exterior, with water often in play and out of bounds always in play. The course’s western border was the 14th hole, now occupied by Highland Elementary School.
Hilltop was one of the first Twin Cities public courses with grass greens. The greens were fast, Rak said, and there were trees and heavy rough off the fairways. The routing was peculiar, to say the least: The first three holes were par 5s, as was the seventh, though Rak said that routing changed in the course's latter years. The course measured 6,210 yards. Greens fees in the 1930s were 35 cents for nine holes.
Walters, recalling area golfers’ appraisal of Hilltop, said: “Players thought the golf course … was the cat’s meow compared to Gross.”
(Right: Hilltop Golf Course Public Links Club House. Photo credit: Jim Bjork)
Rak said Hilltop’s boxes and greens were watered every night and that the “greens were always perfect and tees were perfect.”
Rak, the son of a Polish immigrant woman who brought her young family to the United States and raised four children by herself in Columbia Heights, was born in 1921, the same year M.J. Lamberton bought farmland that would become Hilltop Golf Course.
The exact year Hilltop opened is unclear. The June 1927 issue of the magazine "The 10,000 Lakes Golfer" includes an advertisement for J.A. Hunter, Golf Architect, Minneapolis, with "Hill Top" listed as one of the courses Hunter designed or worked on. The ad, however, includes the notation "plans only" after "Hill Top." The same magazine's September 1927 issue reports that Hilltop had hosted a St. Paul Real Estate board tournament. A 1927 Minneapolis telephone directory includes Hilltop Golf Links.
Update, July 2020: Stories in 1926 editions of the Minneapolis Star and Minneapolis Tribune indicate that Hilltop opened in the fall of 1926. Also, it has been reported in some recently published stories, including one by this author, that Hilltop was Minnesota's first public, "daily fee" golf course. Further research indicates it probably was not. The now-defunct Antlers Park course in Lakeville opened in April 1926, meaning it preceded Hilltop by about five months.
An old Hilltop scorecard includes admonishments by Lamberton: "Ignorance of the Etiquette of Golf and the principal rules governing the game are inexcusable and reflect discredit on the player. ... It is the desire of the owner to maintain Hilltop Links on a par with the finest courses in the country. Please help us to keep it so. Replace turf. ... Players who in any way make themselves objectionable or fail to observe any of the rules may be denied the privilege of the course."
Parsons wrote about the ownership history of Hilltop in her “Bootstrap Town” book: 
“Lamberton died about 1934, and his nephew took over the golf course, leading it to a man named Clovour who operated it until 1939. At that time, about 50 club members bought it for $25 a share and operated it until World War II. During the war years, money to operate golf courses was scarce and, according to Latawiec, ‘the course went to seed.’ "
(Right: Minneapolis Star Tribune article from April 28, 1950)
It was revived by Ralph Arone, who bought Hilltop for $10,000 from the Central Avenue Merchants after the city of Columbia Heights turned down a proposed purchase, said Bob Fetzek of New Brighton, who grew up in Columbia Heights. Fetzek said Arone bought the course in 1942 or 1943; Fetzek helped him repair pipe and restore the watering system. "That course was a big hayfield" at the time, Fetzek said.
“Arone improved the course and ran it through 1946," Parsons wrote, "but when his efforts to obtain a liquor license were unsuccessful, he sold the property to Wilkinson Realty." Fetzek said the purchase price was $75,000.
"The area was replatted and 20 homes were completed in 1947," Parsons wrote. "By 1955, homes in the Hilltop area were advertised in the newspaper: ‘Homes from $13,900 to $16,400 are available. …”
There goes the neighborhood. Well, the neighborhood golf course, anyway.
Nuggets: Hilltop was regarded highly enough to have hosted the 1930 Minnesota Public Golf Association championship and three Minnesota Golf Association Senior Public Links championships, in 1938, '39 and '40. ... In October 1928, a course-record round of 71 was shot by Hilltop's professional, Otis George.
Further update, July 2020: Many social media posts in recent years have contended that the tall, still-standing house on 45th and Chatham was the Hilltop clubhouse. Before Mike Rak died in 2016, I asked him about this, and he firmly said that the clubhouse and manager's house were different buildings. I won't deign to know which is correct, or whether there is a middle ground that explains the truth. A comparison of buildings on the Hilltop grounds in an old photo forwarded by Jim Bjork and posted on ForeGoneGolf.com and a current street view at 45th and Chatham offers evidence of that middle ground, but I won't make a judgment. - Joe Bissen
You can purchase Joe's book, "Fore! Gone. Minnesota's Lost Golf Courses, 1897-1999," on Amazon.com or bn.com.