If you’re planning on traveling to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the 2025 U.S. Open at famed Oakmont Country Club, be sure to set aside time to test your game, nerves and patience on a most difficult 6,100-yard design.
Perched on a cliff overlooking an active steel mill dating to 1875 along the Monongahela River, Grand View Golf Club draws its share of golf curiosity seekers wondering just how hard the course can be.
Well, it will require your A game or be prepared to dig into the bag for more than a dozen balls. No fairway is wider than 24 paces and flat lies can be scarce. As many as 15,000 balls are recovered yearly from the various nooks, crannies and sheer drop-offs, according to staff members.
Designed by renowned western Pennsylvania architect Ferdinand Garbin in 1996, golfers can still hear sounds in their backswings of the first ever and last operating steel mill in the Steel City — Edgar Thomson Steel Works — offering players quite an unusual, unique — and sometimes noisy — backdrop for a round of golf.
“You can play the fifth hole and look at the steel mill off in the distance,” says course owner Bob Beam. “People sometimes think of Pittsburgh as being a smoggy, dirty city, but, quite honestly, every once in a while you’ll see a puff of smoke if they’re burning something. But 99 percent of the time it’s just steam. It rises up and then disappears.”
Like many golf balls here.
The expansive views are worth the price of admission on a layout that is compacted into just 88 acres of hills and hollows. Golfers can see downtown Pittsburgh skyscrapers 10 miles away, flames shooting out of steel mill stacks, steeples of historic Greek Orthodox churches and across the river to national landmark Kennywood amusement park. And that’s just on the front nine.
Who can pass up the opportunity to tackle a course with the nickname of Monster on the Mon? Former KDKA radio personality John Cigna often golfed here and came up with the moniker — and it stuck.
“I see a bigger percentage of better players that tee it up here,” Beam says. “There are public golf courses in the area where you can hit the ball two fairways over and still have a shot at making par. You miss a shot here and you will have a hard time finding your ball, let alone getting a club on it or trying to recover. You have to hit quality shots on this course.”
On a course for significant elevation changes, the 160-foot drop straight down a cliff on the par-3 14th hole makes golfers pause for a minute or two deciding on club selection. Course regulars say drop down three clubs on a hole where you can see only about one quarter of the putting surface from the tee.
That hole is followed by a 365-yard par-4 that is situated in a hollow. There is a bowling alley feel to the drive with a narrow shoot of a landing area. A cliff on the right offers a few waterfalls that serve as a nice photo backdrop.
One of only two par-5s on the course, the closing hole requires golfers to avoid two separate lakes, one on the left for longer drivers and one guarding the approach to the green. The putting surface offers an infinity pool look that just adds to the course’s mystique.
“This is a course where you don’t need to smash the ball every time off the tee,” says Beam, who is a local who grew up in nearby Monroeville, the location for the shooting of the 1978 movie “Dawn of the Dead.” “There really is nothing like this around anywhere. It’s pretty cool and a place I’m proud of.”
Grand View is about a 15-minute drive from Oakmont Country Club, and the price of just $50 is hard to pass up, along with bragging rights of tackling the Monster on the Mon.