"A few years ago, private-equity firm SC Hospitality took over a tennis club in the Hamptons and added pickleball and padel courts and a restaurant overseen by Billy Durney, the chef behind the upscale burger joint Red Hook Tavern. A number of new families joined, the club began hosting Sunday cookouts, and Daniel Haimovic, SC's chairman, started spending a lot of the summer there with his family, including his two elementary-school-age kids, who played tennis, padel, pickleball, and basketball at the club."
"It quickly became "my happy place and my kids' happy place," Haimovic said. He thought it was a shame that there weren't any similar family-friendly clubs in Brooklyn Heights, where he lived with his family the rest of the year, especially given how full of children it is. But working for SC Hospitality, a sports-and-entertainment-focused arm of SC Holdings, he also knew how hard it is to find space for anything approximating a tennis club in New York City."
"The sport requires large high-ceilinged expanses free of columns or pillars; it's much easier to install golf simulators, which can go just about anywhere and have eaten up a lot of discounted commercial space left over from the pandemic. Still, there is a dearth of courts in New York and a growing demand for spaces dedicated to all racquet sports, especially pickleball."
SC Hospitality transformed a Hamptons tennis club by adding pickleball and padel courts and a restaurant, attracting new families and community events. Chairman Daniel Haimovic frequently brought his young children to play multiple racquet sports and sought a similar family-friendly facility nearer his Brooklyn Heights home. Finding indoor tennis space in New York City proved difficult because tennis needs large, high-ceilinged, column-free expanses, while more adaptable uses like golf simulators occupied pandemic-discounted commercial space. Demand for racquet-sport courts, especially pickleball, increased. SC opened a four-court facility at the Mercantile Exchange pit and identified a vacant multi-floor athletic club at the Hotel St. George as a potential site.
Read at Curbed
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]