U.S. Open tennis gets $800 million renovation of Arthur Ashe stadium, Billie Jean King Tennis Center

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More than 1 million fans streamed through the gates of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center during the 2024 U.S. Open, making it the largest annual sporting event in the country.

Its central venue, Arthur Ashe Stadium — the biggest in tennis with almost 24,000 seats — is a 30-year-old concrete edifice with narrow corridors and limited bathrooms and dining facilities. It was built at a time when everyone, the four biggest tennis tournaments in the world included, expected a lot less from their arenas.

Over the next three years, Ashe, as it is commonly known, will undergo a massive, $800 million facelift that every fan, player and United States Tennis Association (USTA) partner should feel in a big way. The project is privately funded, though the USTA has in the past received access to tax-exempt bonds and a special taxation deal with New York City that is common among local sports operations. The 2024 U.S. Open brought in almost $560 million in operating revenue, according to the USTA’s financial report for that year.

It’s the latest move in an ongoing tennis arms race. The runners are the four organizations that run the four Grand Slams: the Australian, French and U.S. Opens and Wimbledon. They all want to keep up with each other at a minimum and to outpace each other wherever they can, in a bid to be the best of the best.

Tennis Australia in 2022 added a new stadium, the Kia Arena, to Melbourne Park, the site of the Australian Open; it has spent over $1 billion Australian dollars ($645 million USD) on upgrades in recent years.

The All England Club, which stages Wimbledon, is in a legal battle with local residents over the building of 39 new tennis courts, one of them a stadium court, so that it can add capacity and hold its qualifying competition there, rather than roughly five miles away. The London event is now the only major in tennis that does not hold qualifying on site, which is the newest and most lucrative frontier in this arms race. On-site qualifying means an additional week of ticket sales, income from on-site concessions and even some sponsorship revenue.

Roland Garros, site of the French Open in Paris, recently added a roof on its second court as well as an additional 5,000-seat stadium. It found room for some new facilities in a set of old stone buildings nearby.

“This project enables us to maintain the greatest stage in tennis,” Lew Sherr, the chief executive and executive director of the USTA said of his organization’s move, a statement that his fellow Grand Slam leaders would likely query.

At the U.S. Open, the players may experience the changes most dramatically. Beginning in 2027, they will get to indulge in a new $250 million performance center. The four-story structure will include vastly expanded locker rooms, warm-up areas and dining facilities. They are currently wedged into two bits of Ashe: the catacombs underground, and an area of the second floor of a building attached to the stadium’s west side.

The front of Ashe will get the arena version of a fancy new doorway, in the form of a giant, Daniel Libeskind-designed steel medallion hanging off its south end. It will overlook the fountain plaza where those millions of fans mill during the tournament, as well as the giant globe further south, an enduring symbol of the 1964 World’s Fair.

For the fancy people who shell out thousands of dollars for tickets with high-end hospitality, the renovation will bring a renovated courtside seating area. Two new areas of luxury suites and additional dining and club areas will accompany 2,000 more seats, taking the number of the priciest seats in the stadium from 3,000 to 5,000. It’s a good deal for the tournament’s coffers: like many premium sports events, the U.S. Open experiences some of its highest demand for its most expensive tickets, including those courtside seats that cost more than $1,000 each per session.

That expansion will pull some inventory from what is known as the loge level, which includes tickets in the mid-range price point of roughly $200 to $600 each.

For everyone who buys the regular tickets all the way upstairs, the benefits will include wider promenades and additional facilities, as well as better access than the crowded escalators and elevators currently available.

A rendering of the proposed renovations to the Billie Jean King Tennis Center. (Courtesy USTA)

Accomplishing all this during the next two-and-a-half years without any interruption to staging a three-week tournament will take some juggling. The entire Billie Jean King National Tennis Center is just 46.5 acres, and doesn’t have much extra space to stage a major construction project.

The USTA went through this the last decade when it rebuilt Louis Armstrong Stadium, built the new Grand Stand court, and added Court 17, a kind of theater-in-the-round of a tennis stadium that seats 2,800.

The first year of construction will involve mostly “behind-the-scenes” and structural work, especially for the new performance center. That’s more complicated than it sounds, since the complex sits on a swamp and buildings requires extra reinforcement to mitigate sinking.

Next year, workers will pursue the renovation of the lower section of Arthur Ashe Stadium and build out the performance center; in 2027, they will complete that building. They will construct the new restaurants and lounges, expand the promenades and create the new entrance and sculpture on the south side of Ashe.

The plan is to complete all that ahead of the 2027 tournament. By then, this Grand Slam arms race will surely have found a new frontier.

(Top photo of Coco Gauff serving inside Arthur Ashe Stadium: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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