Urban turf covers 20 million hectares of U.S. land, so the study of turf management practice and its ecological consequences is important to the livelihood and health of this country. In general, urban lawns have low plant diversity and require large inputs of water, fertilizer, and energy to maintain the desired aesthetic quality. Few studies have been done to document how these inputs affect carbon sequestration in urban soils. To add to this limited pool of knowledge on urban turf this study analyzed C pools and flux from sites representing a range of urban turf management styles existing for at least a hundred years on a single soil type. Two non-turf sites, a savanna and forest, served as a comparison to the urban turf sites. At the golf course, fairways had higher moisture and phosphorus content than rough areas. Fairways also had greater C content per gram soil than the rough. Soil respiration in laboratory incubation and field measurements were greater in rough than fairways suggesting greater C loss to the atmosphere. These results suggest irrigated soils with heavy fertilizer use may increase C storage through increased productivity and decreased C mineralization. In our study, the more highly managed sites (golf course) had greater C content when compared to other less managed sites (cemetery) suggesting information on management intensity is necessary to evaluate C storage capacity of urban landscapes. Modeling global C budgets without including urban soils may result in poor requires understanding of C dynamics across landscapes. Further analysis is required to evaluate the total contribution urban land management makes to terrestrial C storage versus the losses that occur as a result of management practices that require high fossil fuel use.