Now serving: splinters. Deuce to anyone with wheels or knees.
Tennis fans from across the world will take transit to this month’s U.S. Open — but if they depend on a wheelchair or other mobility, they might have trouble getting there: The 7 train and Long Island Rail Road stops at Mets-Willets Point station are rife with barriers that make the massive sports complex a nightmare for the disabled.
Neither the subway nor LIRR station have elevators. Wheelchair users can exit the subway via a ramp off the Passerelle Boardwalk that connects to Flushing Meadows Corona Park USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center complex, but only if they took an eastbound train and only on Mets gamedays. The boardwalk — which passes by the LIRR entrance — is a splinter-ridden, bumpy and deteriorating nightmare to traverse on wheels.
"My chair couldn’t handle some of them," said Eric Ryan, an avid tennis fan and wheelchair user who most recently attended the US Open in 2022. "I have weak muscles and my head and arms kept getting pushed around from all the bumps. I ended up putting on a chest strap to make sure I didn’t fall out."
Ryan likes witnessing history — he saw Andy Roddick and Carlos Alcaraz win their first Grand Slam titles — but doesn’t expect to return any time soon after his 2022 experience.
"It's not that we don't like to go out," said Ryan, the owner of TRIPPr, a transportation service for physically disabled people. "It’s that the places we want to go rarely have us in mind."
Ian MacManus, an occupational therapist who lives in Huntington, took his 77-year-old father-in-law to a qualifying US Open match last summer.
The elder man, who has multiple sclerosis and walks with a cane, “repeatedly, almost tripped and fell walking across the uneven wooden planks on that causeway from the LIRR,” MacManus said.
“It was very dangerous because boards were sticking up, separated and there were bolts and hazardous triple components, all along the wooden walkway.”
The MTA included an accessibility project at the LIRR station in its current capital plan, but not the adjacent subway, and the project remains does not have funding. As far as the subway facility goes, renderings for Mets owner Steve Cohen’s proposed casino show a brand new and elevator-accessible station house in place of the current one, which opened in its current form for the 1939 World’s Fair.
However, neither plan addresses the historic boardwalk, which falls under the city Parks Department’s jurisdiction. Parks has made piecemeal fixes in recent years in advance of a long-awaited reconstruction: The city spent $1.5 million back in 2013 to study a renovation, which was finally announced in 2021 and allocated $146.2 million in the city’s most recent budget.
City officials have pledged full ADA accessibility when the project wraps up — likely years from now.
“NYC Parks staff are dedicated to making the Passerelle boardwalk safe for patrons by repairing and replacing damaged sections, with 200+ boards replaced in just the last two years,” Parks spokesperson Judd Faulkner said in a statement. “The labor-intensive efforts are focused on ensuring the bridge remains usable until the larger project is underway.”
The MTA, meanwhile, coordinated with USTA this year to designate specific Access-A-Ride pick-up and drop-off locations for the first time ever, officials said. The spots will be near the “Champions” entrance to the tennis center, according to MTA spokesman David Steckel.
But Access-A-Ride trips must be pre-scheduled a day prior. Other services, like Ryan’s company TRIPPr, that allows shorter-term booking may not have access.
‘Something needs to be fixed’
In May, the U.S. Tennis Association announced a three-year, $800 million renovation for Arthur Ashe Stadium and the surrounding tennis complex. Reps for the sports league did not return a request for comment about the lack of transit accessibility to their campus.
But the station’s lack of accessibility isn’t just a US Open or Mets issue, disabled New Yorkers told Streetsblog. Concerts and other events at Citi Field can be equally frustrating to access.
Anticipating that access was going to be closed between the boardwalk and the subway station that connects to the ballpark, Harlemite Samuel Tavarez left home early for the Puerto Rico vs. Dominican Republic World Baseball Classic showdown in 2023, taking the 7 train to match.
And he was still forty minutes late: The closure required Tavarez to get off one stop away at Main Street in Flushing and take the Q90 bus back towards Citi Field. The three long, uneven blocks of Roosevelt Avenue by the ballpark have few curb cuts, which added another obstacle.
“Certainly the LIRR issue is big as well,” Tavarez said. “The fact that it isn’t accessible for people with disabilities, I'm annoyed by, and something needs to be fixed.”
A rep for the city Department of Transportation said the agency will be involved in the boardwalk renovation and explore accessibility fixes for Roosevelt Avenue in the interim.
Democratic Party nominee for mayor Zohran Mamdani told Streetsblog that as mayor, he would ensure DOT and Parks have enough staff and money to get the renovations done stat.
“There are more than 10,000 vacant city jobs right now, and we have city agencies, and we even have funding for them to fill those jobs, but there's no interest from the top to actually ensure we have fully staffed agencies,” Mamdani said.
“We don't seem to have a coherent vision for making sure that our streets, curbs and sidewalks are actually living up to the way that New Yorkers use them. It's been a long time since we've had that kind of approach.”
