Three monumental handball walls become a civic triptych, with smaller portraits along the sidelines.
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-sided court; service lines; high concrete rebound wall; chain-link perimeter. Imaginary neighborhood court. Mood: after the final rally. 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.