Holmby Park Pony Golf and Lawn Bowling Guide

Drive down Club View Drive on any weekday morning and you will pass a stretch of clipped grass, a low hedge, and a scatter of small flagsticks that most residents drive past without a second look. Those flagsticks mark an 18-hole golf course, older than most of the houses around it, and on a given Tuesday more people are walking their dogs across it than playing it.

That contradiction is the real story of Holmby Park. Homes in this neighborhood transact at prices that put the surrounding land among the most valuable residential ground in the country, yet the one piece of shared property the neighborhood actually uses together operates with almost no staff, no reservation system, and in one case an honesty box for payment. The park at the center of Holmby Hills runs less like an amenity attached to trophy real estate and more like a small town common that happens to sit inside city limits. Understanding how it works, and who actually keeps it working, says more about daily life here than another list of nearby restaurants would.

A par-54 course nobody guards

The golf course inside Holmby Park goes by two names. The city calls it Holmby Park, formerly Armand Hammer. Golfers call it the Armand Hammer Golf Course, or sometimes just the pony course. It was built in the 1920s as part of the original park design, and golf historians still debate whether the routing came from William P. Bell or from George C. Thomas, the architect behind the Los Angeles Country Club next door. The uncertainty has never bothered anyone enough to settle it, which tells you something about how the course is treated.

It plays to a par of 54 across roughly 832 yards, with no hole longer than about 50 yards. A greens fee runs close to three dollars, and on most days nobody is there to collect it. The flagsticks come up at 2 p.m., every day, whether or not anyone is mid-round. The name comes from Armand Hammer, the Holmby Hills resident and Occidental Petroleum founder who lent his name to the course decades ago, a detail that sits oddly next to the current condition of the greens, which regulars describe as shaggy in stretches rather than manicured.

None of that reads as a complaint from the people who actually use it. The course functions as a shared lawn more than a competitive facility, the kind of ground where a jogger, a dog, and someone practicing wedge shots can all occupy the same 50 yards without friction. That informality is not an oversight. It is the operating model.

The only lawn bowling green inside city limits

A few steps from the golf course, on Comstock Avenue, sits a green that has been in continuous use since 1927. The Holmby Park Lawn Bowling Club plays there every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at 10 a.m., rain or shine, with lessons offered free to anyone who shows up. Annual dues in 2025 ran about $105, which buys access to a club that describes itself with a specific claim worth taking at face value.

"The-- (un)Official Lawn Bowling Club of Los Angeles"

That is how the club refers to itself on its own site, and the description holds up. It is, by its own account, the only lawn bowling club operating within the actual city limits of Los Angeles, a claim that has stood long enough that nobody has bothered contesting it. Wikipedia's entry on the park lists the club's membership at 150 people drawn from 19 different countries, a roster that reflects Holmby Hills' own mix of longtime Angelenos and international residents more accurately than any demographic summary could.

What makes the club worth mentioning here is not the sport itself. It is the fact that a 99-year-old institution keeps operating three mornings a week inside a neighborhood known internationally for gated estates, without a gate of its own, open to whoever walks up. There is a version of Holmby Hills that exists behind hedges. This is the version that exists on a strip of grass anyone can join for the price of a modest membership fee.

The 300 trees nobody else was going to plant

The park's condition, and the streets around it, are not simply maintained by the city. A volunteer effort called the Green Team, run through the Holmby Westwood Property Owners Association and chaired by resident Marnie Bodek, has spent recent years working through a specific deficit: roughly 300 parkway trees missing from the neighborhood's original planting plan.

That plan dates back to the 1920s, when the Janss Investment Company, the developer that carved Holmby Hills out of ranch land, planted 13 different tree species across the neighborhood's 26 streets. More than 2,000 of those trees still stand, some over 90 years old, and they are the reason the neighborhood reads as more wooded than its street grid would otherwise suggest. But decades of loss and attrition left gaps, and closing them has fallen to residents rather than a city budget line. As of the association's most recent count, the Green Team had replanted 76 of the roughly 300 missing trees, with additional funding routed through the local city council office to support further plantings coordinated with TreePeople.

Seventy-six out of three hundred is not a finished project. It is a visible, ongoing one, and it means the tree canopy a new resident sees on any given block is at least partly the result of a volunteer committee's work rather than a municipal contract. That distinction matters if you are trying to understand who actually shapes the physical character of this neighborhood day to day.

A parade that doesn't ask permission

The park's official rules, as posted by the city's own recreation department, are notably restrictive: groups capped at 25 people, no permits issued at the facility, no vending, no moon bounces. And yet Holmby Park is also the finish line for one of the neighborhood's most consistent yearly gatherings.

Every year, the Holmby Westwood Property Owners Association organizes a July 4th parade and picnic that begins at Warner Ave. School and walks north along Loring Avenue to the park, led by Fire Station 71 and accompanied by patriotic music from longtime board member Phil Gabriel. The event has been produced for years by resident volunteer Caron Schwartz, with support from local security firms and neighborhood sponsors rather than a city permit process. It is, in practice, the same pattern as the golf course and the lawn bowling green: a shared resource that runs on neighbor labor rather than institutional infrastructure, scaled up for one day a year into a full parade.

The pattern underneath the address

None of this is what you would expect from a neighborhood this often described in terms of privacy and exclusivity. The homes are private. The park is not. It is staffed by nobody, funded partly by volunteers, and used on an honor system for a sport that costs three dollars to play. The most consistent civic institutions here, a bowling club nearing its centennial and a tree-planting committee working through a specific 300-tree deficit, are run entirely by residents who decided the gap between what the city provides and what the neighborhood wanted was worth closing themselves.

If you already live within walking distance, the practical takeaway is simple. The lawn bowling green plays Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings starting at 10 a.m., with free lessons for anyone curious enough to show up. The pitch-and-putt course is open during daylight hours with flags pulled at 2 p.m., honor-system fee included. And if a stretch of parkway near you is missing a tree it should have, the Green Team is still working through that list.

For a more detailed look at the neighborhood's museums, restaurants, and Westwood Village calendar, our earlier Holmby Hills summer guide covers that ground. This one was about what sits inside the park gates, and who keeps it running.

If you are a longtime Holmby Hills owner curious what today's market conditions mean for a property you have watched appreciate for years, Farhad Yasharpour offers residents a confidential, no-obligation home valuation and a private consultation, with the same discretion this neighborhood has always expected from the people who work in it.