The Strings of Desire: From Racketeering to Rackets
The "One Percent for Hit" plan to address the New York City tennis court shortage
A couple hails an airplane next to their guesthouse. On the floor above, graced by a rambling Shingle Style mansion, a donkey shies away from the abyss. According to the Celestial Real Estate Company’s caption, we are “less than a mile above Broadway. Only ten minutes by elevator.”
It was all a dream, of course, a cartoonist’s fantasy in the pages of a 1909 Harper’s. Rather than individual buildings on garden plots supported by a steel frame, residential skyscrapers were maximized for rentable square footage, fully enclosed and divided into apartments.
Some elements of this drawing, which Rem Koolhaas reproduced in Delirious New York, have made a comeback in the last few years. Manhattan’s supertall skyscrapers, like 432 Park Avenue, boast one unit per floor. But this is a capitalist vision, a fantasy of vacant investment properties where shady billionaires can stash their ill-gotten gains.
Instead, we can reclaim the Celestial Real Estate Company’s utopian aspect. As leftist tennis players, we can open up a new spatial paradigm for the city, one that values the leisure of the masses over the athleisure-filled closets of the few. These are the air rights reforms that will truly benefit society. Let us raise the ceilings of the second bedrooms and butler’s pantries to accommodate our lobs. Let us replace Billionaire’s Row with Doubles Alley, parquet with racquet. Let us replace the stranglehold of special interests with the grip of Wilson. Let us turn wine fridges into ball machines. Let us throw open the doormanned lobbies of the grand apartment buildings to those hungry for the pure, egalitarian feeling of ball against racket. Although it will not be easy, it must be done to go from “greed is good” to the greater good.
A few steps are needed to accomplish this bold but essential vision of redistributed fun.
We must seize the means of construction. In addition to New York City’s existing “One Percent for Art” initiative, we propose a “One Percent for Hit” initiative that requires one percent of all construction costs to support tennis initiatives.
We must use the courts to redistribute the courts. We need tough anti-vacancy laws that target absentee owners whose New York properties are merely investments or pieds-à-terre, and these laws must be enforced in existing judicial channels. These properties will be turned over to a popularly controlled trust – known as “The Hopper” – which will seek to trade properties in order to build up vertical blocks of apartments that can be transformed into tennis courts.
One Percent for Hit’s funds will cover the construction costs of removing floors and laying out courts. These will be good, union jobs, with workers paid fairly for their labor. The only corners cut on these tennis courts will be returns hooked around the netpost.
We need a new infrastructure of access. Using the remaining funds from One Percent for Hit, we can create an efficient system to show all prospective players which courts are open. Although for now we may need to rely on capitalist systems like Link billboards to spread the message, in the future we imagine it to be beamed, Batman-logo-like, into the sky for all to see at 1-hour intervals.
This comprehensive vision of a New York City structured around leftist tennis will provide a template for the egalitarian spread of the beautiful game around the world, truly a World on Strings. Without false modesty, we call our vision the City Open.