22 THE LANDING AT TORRESDALE Stacie Zinn Roberts Stacie Zinn Roberts is a marketing strategist for Tahoma 31 and an award-winning writer and marketing expert with more than 25 years of experience. The first time I ever saw a golf course, I was about seven years old. There was a playground adjacent to my elementary school in Northeast Philadelphia and one afternoon, I scaled a steep hill behind the swingset and entered a deep, dark woods. A dirt path led through the tall, spindly trees, and sunlight dappled through the leaves. At the end of the path, a long green hillside sloped down gently to an enormous white house, the likes of which I’d never seen before. As my friends and I held our collective breath, we felt as if we’d stumbled upon a secret fairyland. When I got home, I excitedly told my mother. She said the enchanted fairyland was the TorresdaleFrankford Country Club. The green slope was part of the golf course designed more than 100 years ago by Donald Ross, and the mansion at the bottom of the hill was the clubhouse. Many years later, in 2014, the club was renamed as The Union League Golf Club at Torresdale. It is one of four owned by The Union League of Philadelphia, a patriotic society founded in 1862 to support the policies of Abraham Lincoln and now a city club with over 4,000 members. On the crest of the hill I’d climbed as a child, The Landing at Torresdale opened in May 2024 as an all-new par-three, nine-hole reversible course, designed by Steve Weisser, ASGCA, of Rees Jones, Inc. The goal was to take some of the pressure off of the main 18-hole course, and offer an additional amenity on a previously Versatile turf for flexible design Tahoma 31 was the ideal choice for a new reversible nine-hole par-three course in Philadelphia.
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