Three one wall handball courts on the Lower East Side at golden hour, the walls scaled up to monuments: low sun raking the concrete, a blue ball between wall and hand, the crowd along the chain link, the tenements and their fire escapes behind, the works as a civic triptych on the walls and portraits along the fence.
Irish immigrants brought hard handball to New York in the late 19th century, and the city made the one wall game its own. A court is just a wall 20 feet wide and 16 feet high with a short line drawn 16 feet out. NYC Parks held its first citywide tournament in 1948 at Heckscher Playground in Central Park, and the U.S. Handball Association formed in 1951 to fix the rules. In January 2000 the city set out to renovate 1,500 of its 2,052 handball courts.
Source · NYC Parks ↗
Three sixteen foot walls with the court lines painted on, the short line and sidelines on asphalt, the chain link fence with its gate, the park benches and the trees, the open hydrant on the sidewalk, tenements with fire escapes behind the walls, a pickup game in the middle court. Mood: golden hour, last game. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.