Today’s City Council vote on a multimillion-dollar upgrade for the US Tennis Association’s center at Flushing Meadows Corona Park ought to be a no-brainer.
Each summer, the National Tennis Center plays host to what Sports Illustrated calls “the highest-grossing annual attended sporting event in the world,” the US Open. In addition to the jobs and revenue the Open brings, the center provides locals with year-round access to tennis courts.
That’s an asset Queens can be proud of — and New York ought to be supporting. In theory, the only sticking point here is the two-thirds of an acre of parkland the center says it needs from the city.
Let’s put this in perspective. The entire tennis center is 42 acres, and it sits in a park of 900 acres. Not to mention that the USTA has already agreed to return 1.56 acres of land it now leases back to the city.
What’s really going on here is this: Activists are attempting to extort as much as they can from the USTA for a planned conservancy for the surrounding park.
We’re all for conservancies. But the way to get one is to encourage citizens to come together for the public good — not to hold investments in a successful enterprise hostage like some Third World nation. Remember too that the very need for a conservancy is an admission that, for all our high taxes, the city is incapable of meeting basic functions such as maintaining city parks.
In short, we encourage the council to answer the activists with a beautiful ace — by voting yea for this investment.