Riverside Golf Club

North Riverside sits just west of Chicago's city limits, where the suburbs of Cook County begin their gradual spread along the Des Plaines River valley. It's classic flatland Illinois golf country — the kind of landscape where designers historically relied on bunkering, green contours, and strategic routing to manufacture challenge rather than topography.

Riverside Golf Club shares its town with one of the most historically significant planned communities in the United States — the village of Riverside, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1869. Whether the course carries any of that legacy in its bones is worth discovering firsthand, but the address alone puts you in terrain with genuine American design history underfoot.

A par-71 layout in this corridor typically rewards course management over power, and the Chicago-area golf scene is a serious one — this is a region that produced Ben Hogan's early tournament stops and hosts some of the Midwest's most competitive amateur play. Expect a straightforward, honest round shaped by the flatlands and the river country surrounding it.