Miniature golf, a '20s fad, comes back in style

On Manhattan's West 21st Street, wooden bananas whirl over a patch of fake turf, while strutting pink flamingos pick at another patch. A wide-mouthed, 12-ft.-long Fiberglas alligator waits to swallow a fluorescent golf ball. No, it's not a discarded backdrop from Miami Vice. The gator's peristaltic mechanism is just about the toughest hole at Putter's Paradise, a miniature-golf course in New York City's Chelsea district. "If you hit the ball too hard, it just bounces right back out of the mouth," explains co-proprietor Jeanne Horning. "If you hit it too soft, it just rolls around in there and doesn't go through."

Miniature golf, a craze of the late '20s, is staging a comeback. In 1930 more than 25,000 courses dotted the American landscape from Lookout Mountain in Tennessee to Los Angeles, with several of the most popular atop New York City skyscrapers. As many as 4 million Americans putted every day, and a popular song bore the title I've Gone Goofy over Miniature Golf. By the early '30s, the game's appeal withered as quickly as it had risen, though mini-courses remained a staple of beach resorts.

The boomlet can be credited to the upsurge in nostalgia for the pop culture of recent periods and the growing popularity of full-scale links. There are an estimated 1,800 courses in the U.S., 54% of them built since 1981, according to one survey. Upwards of 50 million Americans played the tiny greens last year. Some argue that the resurgence is the result of fancy new courses. Once played on flat bits of artificial turf with hollow logs and windmills as props, the modern versions are built around themes of jungle adventures, pirate ships and treasure hunts, with waterfalls, mountains and boat rides. "It's not that people are suddenly saying `Let's go play miniature golf,'" notes Tim Troy, part owner of Lost Mountain Adventure Golf, a new course outside Chicago. "It's that they didn't have anyplace to play."

One of the latest links is Donald Trump's Gotham Golf, a nine-hole, 10,000-sq.-ft. course in Central Park. Opened last month, it features, among replica landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, two of Trump's prized possessions, Trump Tower and the Plaza Hotel.

But not everyone is convinced that the mini-boom will last. Don Clayton, chairman of Putt-Putt Golf Courses of America, which has 325 U.S. franchises, says gross revenues from the links have quadrupled over the past ten years, but a glut of new courses could lead to a collapse. Still, a game that costs as little as $1.50 to play (or around $7 at the adventure setups) has a certain built-in demographic appeal. Says Gary Knight of Lomma Enterprises, a Scranton, Pa., company that builds miniature courses: "Baby boomers have children now and want something to do with their family. Miniature golf fits the bill, and it's cheaper than going to the movies." That doesn't sound very goofy at all.