But Merion is also hallowed golf ground, and returning American golf to its embryonic grass roots is expected to be part of the charm. This is where Bobby Jones completed his Grand Slam in 1930; where Ben Hogan launched his historic 1-iron at the 18th hole in 1950; where Lee Trevino pulled a fake snake from his golf bag before winning his playoff with Jack Nicklaus in 1971.

The whole idea is old time meets big time. Still, when the United States Open was at the Olympic Club in San Francisco last year, the U.S.G.A. had 200 acres at its disposal. Merion has 110. And the Olympic Club was not surrounded by a neighborhood settled more than a century before the Revolutionary War. The logistics are so complicated and labor intensive that the U.S.G.A. said it could lose money on the event.

The first of what became hundreds of meetings in the community near Merion took place in 2005 at Haverford College, which shares a half-mile border with the club and golf course. There would be no United States Open at Merion if Haverford had not agreed to give up as much as 25 acres of its campus for an operational compound, a series of enormous hospitality tents and an 800-car parking lot.

“The college is not a golfing community, so some people were taken aback at the size of what was coming,” said Dick Wynn, Haverford’s vice president for finance, who was involved in the negotiations with the U.S.G.A. “But we wanted to be good neighbors, and as everyone learned that Merion is like a golf museum to golfers, we wanted to help the event come here.”

The college received more than 100 free tickets to the Open, which have been useful for institutional fund-raising. Other tickets have been raffled off to the college community.

There was the occasional clash of athletic cultures, though. When construction of the biggest hospitality tents began just beyond the outfield wall of the Haverford baseball field in early spring, the cranes and steel girders looming over the field were a minor distraction. Then the all-white plastic canvases that make up the tents’ walls and ceilings were stretched across struts and beams.