On a cloudy afternoon, a 36,000-square-foot field of tar looks like it’ll swallow whole anything that steps onto it. At least this is my impression as I approach the matte-black expanse that happens to be the only tennis courts currently being built in all of New York City.

While most of the tennis-minded residents of the city have begun to converge on fan week at the US Open, miles from here I’m being escorted around one of the construction areas at the newly renovated, and elevated, East River Park in the Lower East Side. This is the former site of the Brian Watkins Tennis Center, which once housed a dozen of the city’s most decayed, and most cherished, courts. It was a noisy, chaotic urban playground—a site of pilgrimage for downtown players from all backgrounds.

Today I’m walking past small mounds of rock and stacked building materials and spools of landscaping mesh piled everywhere. The city just recently opened the first half-dozen courts, and the players are already out here pushing balls across the freshly painted surfaces.

My escorts are four men in hard hats and reflective vests (who require me to wear “PPE” as well). They work for both the city’s Department of Design and Construction and HNTB, the construction firm hired to carry out the city’s $1.45 billion “coastal resiliency” project, which began to consume the park back in 2021. The unfinished section of court in front of us, ringed by a small concrete retaining wall and shiny chain-link fence, and the new courts nearby represent a small sliver of that price tag: $2.2 million.

I’ve come out here because I’m interested in what goes into building a tennis court, especially a New York City tennis court. I’d like to get a better idea of the interlocking pieces between city and community. Earlier in the day, I spoke with Manhattan Borough Parks Commissioner Tricia Shimamura, who will oversee the park once the DDC has finished its work. Shimamura referred to the 27,600 tennis permit holders in the city as an “engaged…passionate group.” Code, I assume, for hectoring and particular.

(Shimamura offered me other useful insights about the opaque nature of the Parks Department’s relationship to tennis, like, there is no data on court usage or loads. But the agency listens closely, she claimed, to player feedback. Nor can they say which courts are the most heavily used. There are no plans to light local courts, like the new Watkins, which she claimed is not due to budget constraints but community pushback. Lastly, she told me it costs several thousands of dollars to repatch a cracked court.)

My field trip today was the result of a single email to the DDC. After a quick phone call with Ian Michaels, the agency’s director of public information, I found myself being ushered through a chain-link gate behind a porta-potty. Michaels is a Brooklyn native who references Frederick Law Olmsted, the grandfather of all landscape architects, within minutes of our first meeting on the Delancey Street bridge. Walking into the job site, Michaels lets me know, with no particular emphasis, “I’ve never really understood the whole tennis thing.”

No, these guys aren’t really tennis guys. Not that it matters. Douglas Maffei, the resident engineer for the project, tells me that this is his first tennis court basically ever. “I’m a guy who normally builds airports and amphitheaters and bridges,” he tells me.

Still, my guides appear to be content just to talk about their work, work that for four years has gone largely unnoticed, behind the shipping containers and heavy machinery obscuring the area. And they seem happier yet that someone appears to be interested in it. They’re trying to relate, I think. Bobby Isaac, a trim-looking assistant commissioner for the DDC, offers that his son has just made his high school’s varsity tennis team and had recently taught him how to grip a tennis racquet properly, though he mistakenly calls it a “bat.”

Back at the tar field, a landscape architect named Elvis Tull, who is wearing a thumb ring, tells me that the surface is, what they call, resting. For 30 days, it will rest to ensure levelness. During this time, workers occasionally spray water on the surface to check for pooling and unevenness. “We toss a nickel in the puddles that form,” Elvis tells me. “And if the water is deeper than that nickel, it means the surface needs to be re-leveled.”

I’m told that this is one of the 12 layers that make up a tennis court—the deep tissue of the visible surface. And as soon as the nickel test is complete, a subcontractor specializing in tennis surfaces will apply four layers of Action Pave Acrylic paint onto the courts. These early batches of paint are blended with sand, for grit, while the final layers that make up the top coat and lines are kept sand-free.

It strikes me then that this subcontractor, an expert in sports surfaces, would probably have some stories about iconic courts they’ve built, but they’re apparently on their lunch break. (“What can you do? It’s noon,” shrugs Maffei, the resident engineer.)

Five weeks from now, the surface will be ready for play. This will be, according to Shimamura, the last planned addition to the city’s existing inventory of 570 tennis courts.

So how long is a court expected to last? Fifty years? A hundred? The four men glance at each other, and it’s clear no one really knows. Maffei tells me that the courts, however, come with a 10-year warranty. “Structural damage, like cracks,” he explains, “are the responsibility of the subcontractor.” Small issues like chips on the surface or broken net posts fall on the Parks Department. “I’ll tell you this, though, these courts will never flood, not in a hundred years.”