Whaling City Golf Course

Set on 275 rolling acres in New Bedford’s West End, Whaling City Golf Course (the city’s municipal course, historically known as New Bedford Public Links) plays today as a public, year-round, 18-hole facility with a driving range, practice green, pro shop, and snack-bar/restaurant. The routing occupies largely open, sandy-loam ground bordered by Interstate 195 and Route 140, with long views across broad fairway corridors and only limited intrusion of housing at the perimeter. Current back-tee yardage stretches to roughly 6,780 yards for par 72, with four sets of tees that scale the course for a wide range of players. Conditioning and daily operations are overseen for the City of New Bedford by a management firm; the property periodically hosts leagues, outings, and municipal events typical of a busy public course. Visitors encounter a layout whose bones reflect multiple eras: remnants credited locally to Donald Ross’s original municipal nine from 1920; a major expansion and rebuild in 1947, when the course reached 18 holes; and later reroutings tied to highway construction and a turn-of-the-century renovation that modernized irrigation, turf, and bunkering. As a result, individual holes differ in scale and contouring, but the course’s essential character remains that of a straightforward, wind-exposed New England public links with several greens and landforms widely believed to descend from the early Ross work.