Tennis and pickleball courts coming to North Howard Street
Court 16 Fishtown is slated to open in the spring.
An indoor 14,000-square-foot pickleball and tennis club is coming to 1400 N. Howard St., in the Fishtown area, next spring.
Court 16, a New York company, will occupy about a fifth of the block-long, one-story, formerly industrial property owned by Charlotte, N.C.-based Asana Partners. It is Court 16′s fifth location, and its first outside New York.
Court 16 is a boutique indoor tennis and pickleball club that caters both to adults and children, and offers space to play and receive training. It is named after the court where its founder and CEO Anthony Evrard learned to play tennis as a child in Brussels, Belgium.
“There’s a big need in Philadelphia for high quality [indoor] tennis programming,” said Evrard. “The majority of tennis is really in the suburbs. In Philly itself, outside of the courts at Penn, there’s not a whole lot of offering [especially] for young children.
Court 16 Fishtown will feature four United States Tennis Association-sanctioned courts of different sizes — 36 , 44, 60, and 72 feet —with correspondingly sized rackets and balls. There will be tennis camp offered for children aged 3 and up, ball machine training classes for adults, and individual or group lessons. The courts will also be available for rent for individual or group play.
While weekly lessons are offered, more comprehensive tennis camps will be available too for afterschool and all day in the summer. Professional tennis players and coaches will be brought in to lecture and train.
Membership will be $600 a year for a family, and tennis camp offerings will be $700 a week for nonmembers, with a 16% discount for members. There will be retail space for tennis racquets and other equipment.
Court 16 Fishtown is the latest addition to 1400 Howard Street, which already contains a gym and a day care. Red Bull has a corporate office there as well. A lease negotiation is currently underway for another large space, which would leave only 2,000 square feet of the 78,000-square-foot building available.
The owner, Asana Partners, is an investment firm that targets dense, affluent, and highly educated submarkets for retail expansion. They also have a presence in walkable areas of booming Sunbelt cities like Charlotte and Atlanta, and in localities like Cambridge, Mass., and Miami Beach.
They began investing in Center City Philadelphia in 2018, with five buildings on Walnut Street, and quickly branched into the Fishtown area, where they own three other buildings.
Instead of demolishing the building at 1400 N. Howard St., Asana adapted it for commercial uses and added retail space on the street level.
“This building is able to deliver large floor plates in a high barrier to entry retail market,” said Jacob Cooper, partner at MSC which represented both landlord and tenant in the transaction. “There just aren’t a lot of big buildings with big retail floorplates [in Fishtown].”
Court 16 Fishtown is the latest sports business to announce a Fishtown-adjacent opening. David Gutstadt and Amanda Potter of Good City Studio are opening a 45,000-square-foot space called Ballers in Lubert-Adler’s the Battery on the Delaware River. That will contain courts for racquet games and a turf field, sports bar, and golf simulators.