New U.S. Open Facilities: Game. Set. Unmatched

Back then, the U.S. Open still unfolded each summer at the quaint West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens. But the Open’s lease was ending and relations between the association and the club were about as friendly as Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe.

One day Hester was flying into La Guardia Airport. He gazed over the abandoned, city-owned grounds of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. The property included Louis Armstrong Memorial Stadium — formerly the Singer Bowl — where Gene Krupa had played drums, the Who opened for the Doors, and the New York Mets celebrated their 1969 World Series miracle with a fireworks display.

The stadium sat empty, a wreck. New York City was broke and looking to make a deal.

Hester saw the future.

In 1978, Chris Evert won her fourth straight U.S. Open title and Connors beat Bjorn Borg to win his third Open at the newly converted Armstrong Stadium, to which a smaller, goiter-like Grandstand had been attached.

Some 275,000 people attended the two-week tournament that year. There was a single restaurant called Racquets. Total prize money: $500,000, or about $2 million in today’s dollars. There will be $53 million in prize money this year.

At this, the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Open and the 40th at what is now officially called the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, the event’s organizers will be unveiling Armstrong 2.0. The new stadium completes a five-year, more than $600 million campuswide overhaul. Rossetti, the Detroit-based firm, designed all the new facilities.

Yes, the Open today is anything but quaint. It has become a vast moneymaking corporate playground and high-end shopping mall. That said, the old spirit of the World’s Fair, on whose bones the tennis center rests, somehow has not been extinguished. If most major sporting events these days are generally better experienced on television, this one remains a singular joy to attend, a two-week bingeathon for tennis lovers, not least because in almost every meaningful way the renovations have improved the bottom-line experience of watching the matches.

— Practice Courts

For years, serious fans at the Open wanting to watch Maria Sharapova or Rafael Nadal practice had to peer through dense foliage and holes in fences. Another renovation, completed four years ago, saw the addition of a viewing gallery with more than 1,000 first-come-first-served seats overlooking five practice courts.

The two-sided bleachers also face Courts 4, 5 and 6, which originally had few spots where people could watch the action. Under the bleachers, about 100 fans can now stand courtside and see the players practice. This may be the least heralded improvement to the tennis center, but it provides the equivalent of a backstage pass for anyone who wants to stop by.

— Food Court

On an average day, the Open packs in tens of thousands of fans, a baffling number of them dressed in tennis gear. They sip sparkling wine from plastic Champagne flutes. They peruse the Mercedes-Benz showroom and shop at Ralph Lauren for polo shirts. They wait in endless lines for lobster rolls. Of course they consume plenty of tennis, too.

The Open is a kind of high-priced state fair with Roger Federer and Serena Williams instead of tractor pulls and 4-H pumpkin carving contests. The Food Village is the Midway.

In the evenings, the place turns into the city’s biggest nightclub. The first week is especially festive, with matches everywhere and fans running all over the grounds. By the final weekend the crowds have dwindled, along with the number of players. Labor Day has passed. The Open portends the end of summer.

An undertone of melancholy suddenly insinuates itself, even as the tournament, the last of the Grand Slam events on the tennis calendar, reaches its climax.

I’m probably not alone in feeling nostalgia for the old ramshackle Grandstand, but its replacement, at the southwest edge of the campus on the site of what used to be a parking lot, is undeniably better. It is a more attractive, 8,100-seat quasi-bullring, with a sunken court and impeccable views, mirroring the smaller, instantly beloved bullring of Court 17, which opened in 2013.

The new Grandstand, first used at the 2016 Open, is designed to pack seats toward the shadier side of the court. Increasing the arena’s capacity has allowed the USTA to sell more reserve tickets without cutting back on admissions for first-come-first-served customers. That means it is still theoretically possible to wander in, find an empty chair and while away the day, although good luck with that. Since it opened, the Grandstand, like Court 17, has become a huge attraction.

— Armstrong Stadium and Grandstand

Television loves the south entrance to the tennis center, where the splattering fountain of the World’s Fair Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Corona Park faces Arthur Ashe Stadium. But 80 percent of visitors funnel over the rickety, picturesque boardwalk leading from the 7 train and Long Island Railroad to the East Gate, where the old Armstrong Stadium and Grandstand used to be.

With about 10,000 and 5,000 seats, those aging arenas had their Kodachrome charms. To park oneself in the quirky carbuncle of the boisterous old Grandstand for the better part of a day during the first week of the tournament was to ensure close-up views of some of the best matches. The half-hidden arena felt almost like a secret.

But shade was hard to come by. Entryways were congested, and lines were long. Sightlines could be appalling. Much of the seating was on overcrowded benches. Concessions, shared with Armstrong, occupied passageways that summoned to mind the subway concourse beneath Madison Square Garden.

And there were alarmingly few bathrooms.

The stadiums were demolished after the 2016 Open, and now what greets visitors through the East Gate is the new Armstrong. Taller than the old building, occupying a smaller footprint, and with a retractable roof, it looks from the boardwalk a little like a parking garage: boxy, hulking and loveless, with a louvered facade.

Inside, though, it is state of the art: a 14,000-seat, open-air arena with shade, great sightlines, loads of concessions, and a huge terrace and bar overlooking the grounds, where fans are expected to do what a surprising number of people seem to go to the Open to do — just hang out, eat, drink and hope to be seen.

We will have to see how well the new Armstrong actually works once the tournament starts. But it would not be surprising if it, and its terrace, turn out to be mobbed from morning until the wee hours now that, like Ashe, the new stadium will also host night session matches.

— Arthur Ashe Stadium

When Ashe Stadium opened in 1997, critics pounced. The world’s largest tennis stadium, the place was drab, cavernous and not especially functional. Players complained about swirling winds. From the nosebleed seats, the court was the size of a postage stamp. The sun beat down on an architecture of concrete, metal and plastic.

The USTA had consulted meteorologists who said the Open coincided with traditionally dry weeks, so officials had decided against a retractable roof. During Ashe’s early years, they looked like geniuses.

Then rains delayed the men’s final from Sunday to Monday five years in a row.

The Open clearly needed a roof. But as constructed, Ashe could not support one. Building a replacement stadium was out of the question.

The solution by Rossetti and WSP Parsons Brinckerhoff, the global engineering firm, was to nest Ashe inside a new free-standing structure with eight branching steel columns surrounding the perimeter of the stadium. The columns support a system of immense trusses that hold up retractable panels. The curved, octagonal roof is a kind of giant folding umbrella suspended above the stadium.

The result has not only helped keep the tournament on schedule, it also has lent a futuristic character to Ashe’s exterior, giving it a much stronger silhouette and — more practically — improving the experience of watching tennis.

That is partly because the roof required officials to lop off the top two rows of Ashe. Those 2,000 seats were moved down to the loge level. Video screens were moved down, too, so fewer people now crane their necks to keep track of the score or replays. The roof shades seats even when it is retracted, and while the acoustics of the new structure now amplify every annoying cellphone conversation, they also introduce an illusion of intimacy to the 24,000-seat stadium, ramping up the drama of the silences during tight matches.

Centre Court at Wimbledon, Ashe is not. But it’s better.

And it is best under the lights, when the Open becomes its truest New York self. Wimbledon has lights on only one court and keeps an 11 p.m. curfew. The Open seems almost to take giddy, chest-thumping pride in matches that end up starting later than that and grind into the early morning hours, as if tennis — New York-style Grand Slam tennis — should rival those Depression-era endurance contests where competitors tangoed until they passed out.

Late matches are exhausting even to watch — but they can be exhilarating, too, as the summer heat loosens its grip and fans can wallow in the sheer abundance of the tournament.

With Armstrong now adding night matches, the tennis center has its own version of Broadway and off-Broadway.

Whoever ends up making headlines on court, do not bet against Armstrong stealing some of the spotlight this year.

——

Changing Landscape

1978: The U.S. Open moves from Forest Hills to the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, to the grounds of the 1964 World’s Fair. The first matches are held in a converted stadium named after Louis Armstrong.

1997: The Arthur Ashe Stadium debuts, with 22,547 seats and a $254 million price tag. It is the largest outdoor tennis venue in the world.

2006: The tennis center is renamed the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.

2016: The Ashe Stadium’s $100 million energy-efficient retractable roof is used for the first time. Former Louis Armstrong Stadium is demolished just days after the Open ends.

2018: A six-year, roughly $600 million renovation is completed at the tennis center just in time for the Open’s 50th anniversary.

New U.S. Open Facilities: Game. Set. Unmatched

NEW YORK — In the mid-1970s, the clouds parted for Slew Hester, president of the U.S. Tennis Association at the time.

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New U.S. Open Facilities: Game. Set. Unmatched

NEW YORK — In the mid-1970s, the clouds parted for Slew Hester, president of the U.S. Tennis Association at the time.

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