NYSC Flagship Uptown Racquet Club To Close In January by Rob Dinerman Dateline December 21st
---- In a move with greater symbolic than practical implications, the
Uptown Racquet Club, once the mecca for hardball squash during the
greatest extended stretch in the sport’s history, will be closing on
January 15th. The loss of its four international (i.e. softball) courts
furthers a disturbing recent trend in which commercial clubs, which at
one time were considered the key to squash’s future, are either
sacrificing courts in favor of aerobics rooms and physical-fitness
equipment, or closing their doors altogether.
Although the Fifth Avenue Racquet Club, located at West
37th Street on the fringes of the garment district, opened in 1973 as
the first commercial squash club in New York, it was in
September 1976, when the Uptown Racquet Club --- featuring 14 courts
(12 hardball and two softball), double the number at Fifth Avenue ---
made its flashy appearance on 86th Street and Lexington Avenue in the
heart of the upper east side, that a new and exciting era in squash
really began. That November the club hosted the inaugural Boodles
British Gin Open, a stop on the World Pro Squash Association (WPSA)
hardball tour, which culminated with Victor Niederhoffer scoring an
upset final-round win over perennial No. 1 Sharif Khan, and within a
year a pair of 10-court commercial facilities, the Manhattan Squash
Club on West 42nd Street and the Broad Street Racquet Club near Battery
Park, were in operation, with yet another 10-court commercial Club, the
Park Avenue Racquet Club on 34th Street, to follow in 1978 and an
eight-court club near Lincoln Center four years after that.
The game’s explosion on the professional, recreational,
spectator and sponsorship fronts maintained itself throughout the next
dozen years and was largely due to the presence and impact of Uptown,
with its coterie of teaching and playing pros (led by Stu Goldstein,
the 1978 WPSA Championships winner and a top-three pro on the tour, and
including Ted Gross, Stewart Grodman, Daniel Paris and Nancy Gengler)
and a substantial number of USSRA top-20 amateurs. One of the club’s
most alluring features was that anyone walking on the north side of
86th Street between Third and Lexington Avenues could look through its
wide ground-floor window and see the usually high-quality practice
matches that were being waged on the ground-floor glass-back-wall
exhibition court, and many people who knew nothing about the sport,
impressed by what they were seeing as they glanced through the window,
would enter the club and become members on the spot. Throughout the
latter portion of the 1970’s and the first half of the 1980’s, Uptown
both benefited from and contributed to the massive growth that squash
experienced during that time frame.
In 1985 the pro tour event, which during its last few
years had become the Chivas Regal Open, ended its 10-year run, and a
few years afterwards the ground-floor court was removed as the club
management gradually but inexorably devoted an increasing amount of its
space to its aerobics and physical-fitness facilities, thereby
shrinking the available room for squash courts. During the late 1990’s,
Uptown was down to five courts (four softball and one hardball), all
secreted in an out-of-the-way area of the third floor, and in 2000 the
hardball court was removed and the Fifth Avenue outlet was closed.
By that juncture, Broad Street, the Manhattan Squash
Club and Park Avenue had long since passed on and Lincoln no longer has
any squash courts, as the game has swung sharply back to the private
clubs, almost completely so in New York and to a large degree in other
northeastern-corridor cities as well, making it again inaccessible to
everyone else, as had been the case prior to the outset of the 1970’s.
Squash has been visibly declining as a priority for the management of
the 86th Street facility for quite some time, but there is something
about the actual official closing of the courts in what a few decades
ago had been the heart and soul of squash in New York, that graphically
conveys how transitory and ephemeral commercial squash’s boom years had
been.
