USTA NATIONAL TENNIS CENTER - Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens, New York City

The USTA Tennis Center rests on -- or perhaps "floats" is a more appropriate verb --  a former tidal marsh that, for years, served as a dumping ground for refuse and fly ash, the bi-product of Brooklyn's active concrete industry.  The transformation from a swamp to a city amenity was prompted first by the 1939 World's Fair when the site was leveled and capped.  Site preparation for the 1939 fair allowed for its subsequent reincarnation as a public park.  Today it is more familiarly identified as the site for the U.S. Open, sharing the same subway stop as CitiField, the home of the New York Mets. 

In order to modernize the facilities and to accommodate the increasing numbers of visitors, the USTA embarked on an ambitious effort to expand the existing facilities and redistribute the points of interest to give life to the more seldom used parts of the site.  At the time of this development phase, Court 17 was constructed already, enlivening the formerly comatose Southeast corner.  For this project, the original Grand Stand was demolished and rebuilt on the Southwest corner.  New concourses were added to complete all the needed connections. 

Architect:  Rossetti
Civil Engineer:  Bob deBruin
Principal-in-Charge:  Geoff Roesch
Project Management:  Sid Burke, Tanya Barth
Graphics:  John Merritt, Kristen Reardon, Carrie Eastman

After the site was decommissioned as a fly ash swamp, it was merely covered over, not replaced.  The buildings rest on piles but the site does not.  This means the site, namely around Arthur Ashe stadium (far left in image above), sinks about 2" per year.  In response, periodically the pavers around the stadium have to be taken up, the setting bed needs to be raised, and then the pavers put back.

South Campus

Adequate circulation for the expanded tennis center was of utmost concern.  To address this we introduced a new major axis that directly connects the new Grand Stand (partially shown in the lower left of the plan) and Court 17 (mostly shown in the lower right of the plan).  Just off this axis and centered on the Court of Champions (indicated by the allee at the South edge of the plan), we provided a new courtyard around the Ashe Memorial.  Since seats with good views in the actual stadium were getting harder to come by, many spectators preferred watching the action on the huge Trinitron screen mounted to the stadium. 

Ashe Memorial

Below are four options we developed exploring different ways of comfortably watching the tournament while providing easy access to the adjacent eateries and amenities.

Parking Garage

Occupying a clearly more back-of-house and less sexy part of the site, a new parking garage was highly needed.  Nevertheless, this peripheral area is still part of the campus so we wanted to make the garage not appear so brutal.  Below are some sketches exploring different ways of disguising the structure by working with the architecture without necessarily obscuring it.  The last image addresses the treatment of the streetscape adjacent the parking garage.

"From Dump to Glory" by Robert Moses in The Saturday Evening Post, 15 January 1938

The saga of Flushing Meadows has never had a better raconteur than the key figure behind its becoming a park.