HAZEL CREST, IL — Calumet Country Club has closed permanently, its owner announced Monday.
“In an effort to protect public safety in the Hazel Crest community, W&E Ventures announced today its plans to permanently close the Calumet Country Club,” the company said in a release, “including all golf course operations, and additionally remove all infrastructure throughout the property to prevent vagrancy and security issues.”
The closing includes the removal of all landscaping, golf holes and building structures.
W&E Ventures purchased the property, located at 2136 175th St., in 2020. A Google listing still shows the club as closed temporarily as of Nov. 10. The website notes it as closed as of October 2025.
“Clearing the property’s infrastructure serves as an important safety measure to avoid vagrancy and prevent additional security risks, in order to safeguard the surrounding community,” said Walt Brown Jr., owner of W&E Ventures. “Our team respects and celebrates this property’s legacy as a valued community fixture, and we continue to explore promising options for its next chapter.”
Founded in 1901, Calumet Country Club served as one of the few publicly accessible Donald Ross-designed championship golf courses in the greater Chicago area. Located east of the intersection of I-80 and I-294, the property spans approximately 130 acres, which Hazel Crest annexed in 2023.
It’s a clear end for the storied country club, a place poignant to lovers of the game.
“Over the decades, some of the game’s greats walked these fairways,” wrote Walter Lis, of Chicago Golf Report. “In 1945, Byron Nelson captured the Chicago Victory Open here — his seventh consecutive win in what became his record 11-tournament streak, one of the most untouchable records in golf history. Two decades earlier, Calumet hosted the 1924 Western Open, cementing its place among Chicago’s classic championship venues.”
In 2021, Brown proposed converting the property into an industrial warehouse complex. Homewood Village trustees voted that down.
The Village then voted to disconnect it in 2021, and the golf course property, then, was in limbo from until February 2023, when Hazel Crest annexed the land into its limits.
The group South Suburbs For Greenspace fought plans that would see the land repurposed for industrial use—though some plans even called for a water park and a hotel on the property—as it was being annexed.
As recently as October 2025, real estate development and management company Ryan Companies sought to become part of the property’s future, the Chicago Tribune reports. Though no details on specific plans were disclosed, Ryan Companies’ Vice President of Real Estate Development Kyle Schott told Hazel Crest trustees that they also likely envisioned industrial use.
“… but that doesn’t mean that can’t be mixed with something else, or that there’s not other opportunities that a third-party market study might show to us,” Schott said, as reported by the Tribune.
A PR representative for W&E Ventures said on Monday they are not currently involved with Ryan Properties.
Lis of Chicago Golf Report wrote of the decaying state of the course.
“Years of uncertainty have taken their toll,” Lis wrote. “Once-pristine bunkers have been reclaimed by grass. The fabled ‘pots bunker’ on the 9th hole — a Ross signature — now sits overgrown. The 18th green has shrunk from neglect. The old pool and clubhouse structures have fallen silent.
“And yet, the bones are still there. The contouring, the routing, the shot values — all whispering of an era when craftsmanship and creativity defined course design.”