New York City has roughly 8.3 million people and not much land to spare.
Public tennis courts fill up by Thursday for the weekend. Rooftop gyms trade equipment for a view. Grass, the kind you can lie down on without a sign telling you not to, mostly lives outside the five boroughs.
Twelve acres in the middle of Queens changes that lifestyle for the hundreds of people who call The West Side Tennis Club home.
Not thinking about tennis, New York City has always split space among many, many people who need the same hour of it.
A single court on the Upper East Side might serve hundreds of players across a summer, often leaving them waiting. A rooftop gym can shrink its own footprint, which means fewer machines and smaller classes.
New York earns its density. But density comes with a real cost, and the cost is room.
Families end up splitting activities across three neighborhoods because no single address covers what they need. Adults trade a weekly match for a treadmill, since a treadmill doesn't require a partner or a reservation window. Over time, the workaround becomes the routine, and starts to feel normal.
Twelve acres in the middle of Queens gives people an exit from that.
The club's 38 courts run across grass and hardcourt, plus clay. The grass courts alone are rare in this country outside a handful of clubs. Members walk from a match to the pool to lunch on the terrace, then to a brand new padel court that now fills up on weekend mornings.
At the center of the property sits a 14,000-seat stadium that hosted the U.S. Open for decades and now runs about 30 concerts a season. It may sound like an odd pairing with grass tennis courts, but members who've walked past the stadium on their way to a match say otherwise.
Fifteen minutes from Penn Station by train puts all of this closer to Manhattan than you’d expect from a property this size.
Space only matters if people use it, and the pattern at The West Side is consistent.
A parent drops a child at a junior clinic, then plays their own match or does a quick workout in the fitness center instead of sitting in a car for forty-five minutes. A family spends a full Saturday on the property, moving between the pool and a lunch on the terrace without a single drive between stops.
Some members never intended to play tennis at all. They joined for the pool, the space, or a concert ticket, and found a second reason to stay.
Other families point to the acreage itself as the draw, describing how much easier weekends became once one address covered what used to take three.
It's tempting to see this amount of green space under luxury and move on. But our members who use the property describe it: these are the weekend hours they got back, once a single membership replaced a court reservation in one borough and a gym membership across town.
Our twelve acres give members a place to just be, instead of three.