The Grass-Court Cathedral: A History of Forest Hills Stadium

Walk up Burns Street in Forest Hills and the thing sneaks up on you: a horseshoe of concrete and steel, wrapped in the Tudor half-timber fantasy of the West Side Tennis Club, sitting in the middle of one of Queens' most genteel neighborhoods like a secret the block keeps well. Forest Hills Stadium holds roughly 14,000 people, and for a certain kind of music fan it is holy ground.

It started as a temple to tennis. The West Side Tennis Club built the stadium in 1923, and for decades its grass courts hosted the U.S. National Championships — the tournament that became the U.S. Open — before the event decamped to Flushing Meadows in 1978. That is the club's Tudor-clubhouse pedigree: white flannels, strawberries, the polite thwock of the baseline rally. The concerts were the plot twist nobody at the net saw coming.

And what a twist. In 1964 the Beatles played the stadium, turning the grass-court cathedral into a screaming, flashbulb-lit riot. The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and a murderer's row of the 1960s and '70s followed. For a stretch, Forest Hills was where the culture came to be seen.

The local angle is almost too neat. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel both graduated from Forest Hills High School, class of 1958, and the stadium down the road became a recurring stage in their story — the duo first performed together there on Aug. 6, 1966, returning across the late '60s and early '70s.

Then the music stopped. For decades the stadium sat mostly dormant, a grand ruin hosting the occasional event while the neighborhood debated what to do with it. Its revival came in the 2010s, when new operators reopened it as a marquee outdoor venue — Paul Simon himself returned solo on June 30, 2016 — and a steady calendar of headliners (Mumford & Sons, Alabama Shakes and beyond) reestablished Forest Hills as one of New York's most atmospheric places to see a show.

Which brings us to this month, and a full-circle moment that even a screenwriter would call too on-the-nose. On July 8 and 9, 2026, Paul Simon — now 84, and a Queens native to his bones — played the stadium again on his "A Quiet Celebration" run, weaving new songs with Graceland classics and Simon & Garfunkel standards, and bringing out his wife Edie Brickell for a duet. Sixty years, almost to the week, after he first stood on that stage.

"The last time I played here, we were dodging lightning bolts," Simon told the crowd, as reported by Michael Perlman in the Forest Hills Times. "The first time that I played here was in August 1966 – Sixty years ago."

That is the whole appeal of the place in two sentences. Forest Hills Stadium is not a neutral box; it is a building thick with its own history, where the Beatles once screamed off the walls and a hometown kid can come back at 84 to close a circle he opened as a young man. Queens has a lot of cathedrals. This one just happens to have grass courts.

Sources: Forest Hills Stadium Calendar; Paul Simon's "A Quiet Celebration" Graces Forest Hills Stadium (Forest Hills Times)