Arthur Ashe Stadium: Capacity, Roof, Seating and History
Inside the US Open's main court in Queens, New York: how Arthur Ashe Stadium seats 23,771, how its retractable roof works and why it was built so big.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished US Open & American Tennis26 min read
- Capacity
- 23,771
- Opened
- August 25, 1997
- Retractable roof
- Completed 2016
- Location
- Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York
Arthur Ashe Stadium is the main court of the US Open, at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, New York. It seats 23,771, more than any other stadium built for tennis anywhere in the world. It opened on August 25, 1997, gained a retractable roof in 2016, and stages both singles finals of the United States Tennis Association's championship each September, after two weeks of separately ticketed day and night sessions.
On a clear afternoon the top row has a view of the Manhattan skyline, the steel globe of the Unisphere and the jets sliding down toward LaGuardia. The tennis is harder to make out. That trade, an enormous building bought at the cost of closeness, is the first thing to understand about the place, and nearly every argument about it since 1997 has been a version of the same one.
Arthur Ashe Stadium in one paragraph, and the numbers behind it
- 23771Seats
- 1997Year opened
- 2016Year the roof was finished
- 90Luxury suites
Capacity is the USTA's listed figure for tennis. The suite count covers both suite rings. Years are those of the first US Open played with each feature.
The stadium stands in the middle of a 46.5-acre tennis complex on New York City parkland, which the USTA operates under a lease and opens to public players for most of the year. Its court is an acrylic hard court, the kind of surface the tournament has used since it left Forest Hills in 1978; the story of how the Open went from grass to clay to its present courts is in our guide to the US Open court surface. Around that court rise four kinds of seating: a courtside bowl, a loge tier, two rings of suites holding 90 boxes between them, and an upper deck the USTA calls the promenade.
The capacity has crept upward. The listed figure on opening day was 22,547. Reconfigurations since then have taken it to 23,771, which is the figure the USTA has listed in recent years and the one printed on almost everything written about the building.
"Largest tennis stadium in the world" needs one qualifier, and it is worth getting right. Bigger crowds have watched tennis. The Battle of the Sexes between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs drew 30,472 to the Houston Astrodome in 1973. An exhibition in Brussels in 2010 put 35,681 in a soccer stadium, and Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal played in front of 51,954 in Cape Town in 2020. Every one of those was a temporary court laid inside a building made for another sport. Among venues designed for tennis, Ashe is first by a distance: Stadium 1 at the Indian Wells tournament in California holds about 16,100, and none of the other three Grand Slam center courts reaches 16,000.
Size on this scale has a purpose that has little to do with sightlines. The US Open supplies the bulk of the USTA's income, and that money pays for what the association does in the other fifty weeks of the year. More seats and more suites in the main stadium mean more of it. The building was designed around that arithmetic, and it shows.
How the seating is stacked from courtside to the promenade
Four levels, and a different sport from each of them.
| Level | Where it sits | What the tennis looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Courtside | The lowest bowl, wrapped around the court | Pace and spin at full strength; the far baseline is foreshortened |
| Loge | The second tier, directly above courtside | The whole court in view with the ball still easy to follow |
| Luxury suites | Two rings of enclosed boxes above the loge | A broadcast-height view from behind glass or an open balcony |
| Promenade, lower rows | The front of the upper deck, above the suites | The geometry of each point, clearly, with small players |
| Promenade, upper rows | The back of the upper deck, under the roof frame | Patterns and placement; individual shots are hard to read |
Courtside and loge
The courtside bowl is the smallest and lowest ring, and it is where the speed of the modern game is actually visible. A first serve that looks routine on television arrives at the returner's hip before a spectator's eyes have refocused. What courtside gives up is shape. From a low seat at one end, the far half of the court flattens, and a ball landing a foot inside the baseline looks the same as one landing on it. Most of these seats are held by subscribers and corporate accounts for the full tournament, which is why they can be half empty in the first hour of a day session and full by the second set.
The loge is the tier most regulars would choose if money were not a factor. It is high enough to open up the angles and low enough that the ball never becomes a guess. Seats behind either baseline show the width of a rally, the way a cross-court forehand pulls an opponent off the doubles alley. Seats along the sideline show depth and pace instead. People who play the game tend to prefer the ends. People who want to feel how hard the ball is being hit tend to prefer the sides.
The suite rings and the promenade
Above the loge the building does something the older major stadiums do not. Two full rings of suites circle the court, and only above them does general seating resume. Everything in the promenade starts above two stories of boxes.
The front rows of the promenade are better than their reputation. The view is steep, the court reads like a diagram, and a spectator can see a point being constructed two shots ahead. The back rows are a different proposition. Players become figures, the ball is tracked partly by the sound of the strike arriving a fraction of a second late, and the video boards do a good share of the work. Nobody who has sat up there forgets the wind either.
Promenade seats make up the largest single block of the stadium, so the typical Ashe experience is the upper one. That is the plain consequence of putting the suites in the middle of the bowl, and it comes up again further down this page.
Sun, shade and the long view from the upper deck
A day session in late August can mean five or six hours in direct sun, and where the shadow falls matters more than the row number.
The afternoon sun over Queens sits in the southwestern sky and drops toward the west. Seats on the west and south sides of the bowl have it behind them, so the structure above shades them first, usually by early to mid afternoon. Seats on the east and north sides look into it and stay lit until late in the day. That is a rule of thumb, not a guarantee for any single seat: the angle shifts over the course of the tournament, the upper and lower tiers behave differently, and an overhang that covers row M may not cover row C.
Since 2016 there is a second source of shade. The fixed part of the roof, the steel frame and fabric that stay in place when the moving panels are open, hangs over the upper rows of the promenade all the way around. The highest seats in the building are now among the most sheltered at midday. The lower bowl, far below the opening, gets the least help.
The shadow on the court
The same frame throws a shadow onto the playing surface. Through the afternoon a hard line between sunlight and shade moves across the court, and for a stretch of every day session one player is serving out of brightness into dark or the reverse. Players mention it most years. Picking up a ball that crosses from glare into shadow is a real difficulty at the speeds involved, and it tends to arrive in the second match of the day, when the big names are on.
The tournament has also used the roof for shade on purpose. During the extreme heat of the 2023 Open, the panels were partly closed over a sunlit court to cool the playing area without sealing the stadium. It was an improvisation, and a sensible one.
How far the top rows really are
The distance from the back of the promenade to the far baseline is long enough that sound and sight separate. The player swings, and the crack of the ball comes after. Spectators in those rows follow rallies by the players' movement as much as by the ball, and they watch replays on the boards for anything close to a line.
There are compensations. The upper deck is where most of the noise comes from on a big night, and it is the one part of the stadium where the full pattern of a point is laid out, including how much court a great mover covers between shots. A front-row promenade seat behind the baseline is a better place to watch tennis than a high loge seat in a corner, and regulars know it.
The Arthur Ashe Stadium roof: fabric panels over a 250-foot opening
For its first nineteen Opens the stadium had no cover at all. The roof that changed that was announced by the USTA in 2013, went up in stages around the tournament, and was ready for the 2016 US Open at a reported cost of about $150 million.
Its moving part is a pair of panels. Each is a steel frame skinned in PTFE, a coated fabric that is light, sheds water and lets some daylight through. They ride on rails across the top of a fixed superstructure and meet in the middle, covering an opening roughly 250 feet by 250 feet. Closing takes between five and seven minutes. Wimbledon's Centre Court roof needs longer, and then needs more time again for the air inside to settle before play resumes on grass; a hard court under a fabric roof can be back in use quickly.
- Weather watchThe tournament's weather staff track approaching rain and advise the referee's office, often before a drop has fallen.
- The referee's callThe tournament referee decides whether to close. It is the referee's decision, not the players' or the chair umpire's.
- Play stopsThe umpire suspends play, normally at a break between games, and the players sit or leave the court.
- Panels moveThe two fabric panels travel along their rails and meet over the court in roughly five to seven minutes.
- Air handlingA ventilation and chilled-water system works to keep humidity and condensation down inside the closed bowl.
- Play resumesThe court is checked and the match restarts as an indoor match on the same surface.
The general sequence under the US Open's roof policy. The tournament is an outdoor event and the roof is open by default; timings on a given day depend on the weather and the state of the match.
Who decides, and on what basis
The US Open is an outdoor tournament, and its roof policy starts from that. The panels stay open unless it is raining or rain is close. The decision belongs to the tournament referee, who can also order a closure before a session begins if the forecast is bad enough. As at the other majors, a match that restarts under the roof generally finishes under it.
The first closure in competition came on August 31, 2016, during a second-round night match between Rafael Nadal and Andreas Seppi. Rain arrived, the panels shut, and play carried on after a pause of a few minutes. For a tournament that had lost five straight men's finals to weather, it was an event in itself.
What the roof does not do
It does not make Ashe an indoor arena in the full sense. The air system limits humidity but cannot remove it, and the building was never insulated for sound. It also covers one court. Louis Armstrong Stadium got its own roof in 2018, which made two, and on a wet day every other court at the National Tennis Center sits idle. Matches on those courts back up, sometimes for days, even as the Ashe schedule runs to time.
Why the roof stands on its own steel frame
The ground under the tennis center was a salt marsh, and then it was a dump.
Through the early twentieth century the Corona Ash Dumps took the furnace ash and street sweepings of Brooklyn, piled so high that F. Scott Fitzgerald turned the site into the "valley of ashes" in The Great Gatsby. Robert Moses had the heaps leveled for the 1939 World's Fair, and the 1964 fair was held on the same ground. Flushing Meadows-Corona Park is what was left behind. Fill over marsh is poor material to build on, and every large structure in the park stands on piles driven down to something firmer.
Arthur Ashe Stadium does too, and its foundations were designed in the 1990s for the weight of the stadium and nothing more. That was the whole problem. For years after the opening the USTA's answer to the roof question was that the building could not carry one. Studies of conventional designs came back the same way each time: too heavy for the bowl and the soil beneath it, and far too expensive to make work.
The table over the stadium
The design that broke the deadlock, by Rossetti, the firm that drew the original stadium, stopped asking the bowl to hold anything. Eight steel columns stand outside the stadium walls. Each sits on its own concrete base, and published accounts of the project describe twenty piles under each base, driven 150 to 200 feet down. On top of the columns sits a steel superstructure weighing thousands of tons that spans the entire stadium like a table set over a bowl. The roof and the seating are two separate buildings that happen to occupy the same spot.
Fabric was the other half of the answer. A PTFE membrane weighs a small fraction of what glass or metal panels would, which kept the moving sections light enough for the frame, and the frame light enough for the ground.
Construction had to fit around a tournament that could not move. The steel went up first and stood bare over the 2015 Open. The membrane and the mechanism followed in time for 2016. The roof was the centerpiece of a wider rebuilding of the grounds, priced by the USTA at about $550 million, that also produced a new Grandstand court in 2016 and a new Louis Armstrong Stadium in 2018.
One consequence is permanent. Because the fixed frame is always there, an "open" Ashe is less open than the stadium was before 2016. The hole in the roof is far smaller than the bowl beneath it. Wind, light and sound all behave differently as a result, with the panels in either position.
What a closed roof changed about the tennis
Start with the calendar. From 2008 through 2012 the men's singles final was postponed to Monday five years in a row because of rain. The tournament's old "Super Saturday" format, with the men's semifinals played the day before the final, left no slack, and one wet weekend was enough to push the finish into the working week. In 2013 and 2014 the USTA simply scheduled the men's final for Monday. The Sunday final returned in 2015, and from 2016 the roof guaranteed it.
It guarantees every Ashe session, in fact. A ticket for the main stadium now buys tennis whatever the sky does, which changed the proposition for spectators and for the networks that plan two weeks of programming around those sessions.
Noise
The first complaints came within days of the first closure. A crowd of more than 23,000 that talks through points, as New York crowds do, produces a steady hum, and under the new structure the hum had nowhere to go. Players said in 2016 that they struggled to hear the ball coming off the opponent's strings, which is a real loss, because good players read spin and pace partly by ear. Heavy rain on the fabric was louder still; Andy Murray said after a match under the closed roof that year that he could barely hear the ball. The USTA acknowledged the problem. The building is quieter with the panels open, but the fixed frame holds sound in either way.
Air
Humidity is the other change players noticed. After losing a fourth-round night match to John Millman in 2018, Roger Federer said he had found it hard to get air, and he suggested the roof structure had reduced circulation in the stadium even with the panels open. One player's account on one hot night is not a measurement. It does fit the physics: a deep bowl with a lid over most of it does not ventilate the way an open one does.
What the frame took away, on the credit side, is the wind. Before 2016 the swirling gusts at court level in Ashe were notorious, and several late-round matches were decided as much by who coped with them as by who played better. Much of that has gone.
The court underneath did not change, but the conditions on it did. Heavier air and less wind suit clean ball-strikers and flatter hitters, and they take a little away from players who use the elements. Our explainer on how hard courts play goes into why air and temperature matter as much as the paint.
Who gets scheduled on Ashe, and who goes to Armstrong
Four singles matches a day is the normal ration through most of the fortnight: two in the day session and two in the night session, with the stadium emptied between them. The night card and its famous late finishes have their own page in our guide to the US Open night session.
| Stage of the tournament | What is played on Ashe | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Early and middle rounds, day | Two singles matches | Doubles may be added if the singles finish quickly |
| Early and middle rounds, night | Two singles matches, usually one men's and one women's | A separate ticket from the day session |
| Women's semifinals | Both matches | Played back to back in one evening in recent schedules |
| Men's semifinals | Both matches | Played the following day |
| Finals weekend | Women's singles final, then men's singles final a day later | Doubles finals also go on the main court |
How the order of play is built
The referee's office and the tournament director set each day's order of play the evening before, with the American broadcaster's wishes very much in the room. The inputs are predictable. The top seeds get Ashe. So do defending champions, the leading Americans and any player whose name sells a session alone. A first-week match between two unseeded players reaches the main court only when one of them is retiring or has just beaten somebody famous.
The published schedule gives a clock time only for the first match of each session. Everything after it is listed as "followed by," which is the sport's way of admitting that nobody knows how long a tennis match will take. A spectator with a day ticket knows who is playing and in what order, and not much else.
What falls off the Ashe list goes to Louis Armstrong Stadium, which seats about 14,000 and has had a roof of its own since 2018, and then to the 8,125-seat Grandstand. Many players would rather be there. A full Armstrong is tighter and louder per seat than a two-thirds-full Ashe at one in the afternoon, and the lower-ranked player in a big match often gets more of the crowd on the smaller court.
There is a fairness argument buried in the schedule as well. The players who are put on Ashe every round get a roof, a guaranteed start and no rain delays. The ones on the field courts do not. Over a wet first week that is a real competitive advantage, handed to the players who need it least. The wider structure of the event, from draw size to tiebreaks, is laid out in our US Open format explainer.
Getting to Flushing Meadows and through the gates
Most people arrive by train, and the tournament would prefer that everyone did.
The 7 subway line runs from Hudson Yards and Times Square across Queens to Mets-Willets Point, the same station that serves Citi Field next door. The Long Island Rail Road's Port Washington Branch stops at its own Mets-Willets Point platform during the Open, a single stop from Woodside and a short ride from Manhattan or from Long Island in the other direction. From either platform a wooden boardwalk crosses the rail yard and delivers the crowd to the East Gate.
Driving is possible and slower. Parking is shared with the Mets' ballpark, and on days when the baseball team is home the lots and the highways around them fill early. The South Gate, on the park side near the Unisphere, is the usual entrance for anyone walking in from the rest of Flushing Meadows or being dropped off.
An Ashe ticket against a grounds pass
The distinction that matters at the gate is between the two basic products.
An Arthur Ashe Stadium ticket is a reserved seat in the main stadium for one session, day or night. It also works as admission to the grounds, with first-come seating on the field courts and in the general admission areas of Armstrong and the Grandstand. A grounds pass is the same thing without the Ashe seat. It gets its holder into everything except the main stadium, and it is sold for day sessions in the earlier part of the tournament, when the outside courts are full of singles matches.
For the first several days a grounds pass is arguably the better buy. Dozens of matches are in progress at once, the seats on the field courts are a few feet from the players, and a seeded player on Court 17 is closer than anyone in the Ashe promenade will ever get. By the second week the outside courts have thinned to doubles and juniors, and the main stadium is where the tournament is.
The week before the main draw is different again. The grounds are open free of charge for qualifying, a custom explained in our guide to US Open qualifying, and Ashe itself is mostly used for practice. Watching a top-ten player hit for an hour from the lower bowl, at no cost, is one of the better deals in American sports.
Security screening applies at every gate and the bag rules are strict. The USTA publishes the current ones each summer, and they are worth reading before leaving home.
Why the USTA built it in 1997
From 1978 to 1996 the main court of the US Open was Louis Armstrong Stadium, and it was a conversion. The building had started life as the Singer Bowl, an arena put up for the 1964 World's Fair, later renamed for the jazz musician who lived nearby in Corona. When the USTA moved the Open out of the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, it cut the old bowl into a main stadium of roughly 18,000 seats with a smaller Grandstand court attached to its side.
It was steep, loud and popular. It was also too small for what the tournament had become, with too few of the suites and club seats that by the 1990s were paying for every new stadium in American sports.
The expansion that followed was negotiated with New York City in the early 1990s, during the mayoralty of David Dinkins, a devoted tennis fan who defended the deal for the rest of his life. The USTA would pay for a new main stadium and a larger site. The Open would stay in Queens. The association's cost for the stadium was reported at $254 million.
Bigger than any rival, on purpose
The new building could have been a 16,000-seat stadium with one ring of suites. The USTA chose something half as large again. The reasoning was financial and it was candid: the Open is the association's engine, the main stadium is where the money is made, and the demand in New York was there to fill it. A stadium of that size on a tennis court's small footprint could only go up, which is how the promenade ended up where it is.
Opening day was August 25, 1997. Whitney Houston sang at the dedication. The first match on the new court was a women's first-round meeting in which Tamarine Tanasugarn of Thailand beat the American Chanda Rubin in straight sets. Two weeks later Patrick Rafter and Martina Hingis won the first singles titles decided there, Hingis by beating an unseeded seventeen-year-old named Venus Williams in the final.
Armstrong stayed on as the second court with its upper rows removed. The original was demolished after the 2016 tournament and its replacement opened in 2018.
The man the stadium is named for
Arthur Ashe won the first US Open.
That needs unpacking. The national championships of the United States date to 1881, but 1968 was the year tennis went "open," admitting professionals to the major tournaments for the first time, and the event at Forest Hills that September was the first to carry the name US Open. Ashe beat Tom Okker of the Netherlands in the final, 14-12, 5-7, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3.
He was an amateur. He was also a lieutenant in the United States Army, on leave from West Point, where he worked as a data processor and coached tennis. Keeping amateur status preserved his eligibility for the Davis Cup, and it meant he could not take the winner's check. The $14,000 first prize went to Okker, the beaten finalist. Ashe received a daily expense allowance of $20.
The career
Ashe was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1943 and grew up playing on segregated public courts. He won the NCAA singles title at UCLA in 1965 and was the first Black player chosen for the United States Davis Cup team. After 1968 he added the Australian Open in 1970, beating Dick Crealy in the final, and Wimbledon in 1975, where his 6-1, 6-1, 5-7, 6-4 win over the heavily favored Jimmy Connors remains one of the great tactical performances in a major final. Through the 2025 season he is still the only Black man to have won the singles title at any of those three tournaments. His place among the country's major winners is covered in our list of American Grand Slam champions.
Heart trouble ended his playing career in 1980. He captained the Davis Cup team, wrote a three-volume history of Black American athletes, and was arrested in 1985 at a demonstration outside the South African embassy in Washington. In April 1992 he announced that he had contracted HIV from a blood transfusion during heart surgery nearly a decade earlier. He died on February 6, 1993, at 49.
The name and the statue
When the USTA announced in 1997 that the new stadium would carry Ashe's name, it was giving up what would have been one of the most valuable naming-rights deals in American sports. The association has not always been credited with restraint. Here it earned the credit.
Outside the stadium, in a garden on the way in from the South Gate, stands Soul in Flight, a bronze by the sculptor Eric Fischl unveiled in 2000. It is not a portrait. The figure is a nude male athlete reaching upward in the motion of a serve, and it drew complaints when it was installed from people who wanted a likeness. Fischl's argument was that Ashe's life stood for something larger than his face. The stadium has the name; the statue was meant to carry the idea.
Scale, suites and the criticisms that have never gone away
The complaints began on opening day and have changed remarkably little.
The building is too big for tennis. That is the core of it. Tennis is played with a ball a little over two and a half inches across on a court 78 feet long, and a spectator has to be able to see that ball to follow the game. A stadium that puts its largest block of seats above two suite levels has decided that a certain number of its customers will watch the scoreboard.
The suites are the specific grievance. At Wimbledon and Roland Garros the seating rises in an unbroken slope, and the worst seat in the house is still within reach of the court. At Ashe the two rings of boxes take up a band of height in the best part of the bowl and lift everything above them. It was a commercial decision and a successful one. It is also the reason the promenade is as high as it is.
Empty seats are the visible symptom. The courtside sections belong largely to corporate holders who arrive late or not at all for early matches, so television pictures of a first-week day session often show a packed upper deck above rows of blue plastic. Players notice. Several have said over the years that they prefer Armstrong or the Grandstand for atmosphere, and the old Grandstand, before its replacement in 2016, was close to a cult favorite.
What the renovation is meant to fix
In 2025 the USTA announced the largest investment in the site's history, a project it priced at $800 million and said it would fund without public money. The Ashe portion, phased around the tournament and scheduled for completion by the 2027 Open, is aimed at the bottom of the bowl: the association said the courtside level would grow by about 2,000 seats, from roughly 3,000 to 5,000, with new suite levels and wider concourses, plus a new main entrance. A separate player performance center is part of the same plan, and the stadium's listed capacity may be restated once the work is finished.
More seats near the court is the right instinct. The plan does not, on the USTA's own description, bring the upper deck any closer, because nothing can. The promenade's height is built into the structure, and the criticism that comes with it will outlast this renovation and probably the next.
Ashe against Centre Court, Rod Laver Arena and Philippe-Chatrier
The other three majors arrived at almost the same number independently, a shade under or over 15,000. Ashe holds roughly 8,500 more people than the largest of them. That gap is the entire promenade's worth of difference in how the tennis is experienced.
| Main court | Tournament | Surface | Retractable roof since |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arthur Ashe Stadium | US Open | Hard | 2016 |
| Rod Laver Arena | Australian Open | Hard | 1988 |
| Centre Court | Wimbledon | Grass | 2009 |
| Court Philippe-Chatrier | French Open | Clay | 2020 |
Roofs
Melbourne was first by two decades. Rod Laver Arena opened in 1988 with a sliding roof already built in, and the Australian Open now has three covered stadiums. Wimbledon added its Centre Court roof in 2009 and another over No. 1 Court ten years later. New York followed in 2016. Paris finished last, when a rebuilt Court Philippe-Chatrier got its cover in 2020.
The designs differ because the problems did. Melbourne's roof was drawn into a new arena from the start. Wimbledon's folds like a concertina over a grass court that sweats under cover, which is why its closures take longer to turn into play; the customs around that court are described in our piece on Wimbledon's rules and traditions. Ashe is the only one of the four whose roof is structurally a separate building, for the reasons the ash dump imposed.
Atmosphere
Centre Court is quiet during points to a degree that surprises first-time visitors, and its crowd treats silence as part of the event. Chatrier is partisan and can turn on a player. Rod Laver Arena is loud in a good-natured way and close to the court on every side.
Ashe is none of those. It is the biggest and the noisiest, and it is the one where the crowd is least interested in the idea that tennis is watched in a hush. People walk the upper concourses during points. They talk. At a night match in the second week the sound is a continuous roar that players either feed on or fight, and a comeback by an American in the fifth set there is as loud as tennis gets.
Whether that makes it the best of the four or the worst depends on what a person wants from a tennis stadium. As a place to see the ball, it is the weakest of the main courts for most of the people in it. As a place to feel a big match, it has no equal, and the two facts come from the same decision made in the 1990s. More on the sport's venues and tournaments is collected on our tennis hub, and the rest of the American guides are indexed on the USA page.