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Court by court

The courts

Residents decide what gets built. Here is what that has produced so far, what a court still waiting looks like, and everyone it takes to turn one into the other.

Home The courts Activation & art Brick by Brick

Where it started.
Where it's going.

Close view of someone threading a new net onto a bright red rim on a freshly installed glass backboard
A new rim and a new net going up. Photo credit to confirm.
  1. Aerial view of the renovated basketball court at Pomonok Houses, painted blue and yellow with a large P at center court

    2022 · Queens

    Pomonok Houses

    The first court. More than 200 Pomonok residents took part in surveys, workshops and community events to decide what their open space should become — and they picked the basketball court. It opened with new surfacing, paint, hoops and nets, and it set the model for everything since.

    With NYCHA's Connected Communities initiative and Hester Street · Read the story

  2. Aerial view of the transformed Harborview Terrace play area, with a blue court, colorful asphalt art and a flower-painted play surface Ground-level view of the Harborview Terrace court, painted in pink and blue waves, with You Belong written in many languages along the wall

    2023 · Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan

    Harborview Terrace

    Twenty thousand square feet of underused asphalt became a court, a pickleball court, a ping pong table, new seating and more than twenty planter boxes. Residents and over a hundred volunteers did the work. Along the walls, You Belong is painted in more than twenty languages, including Braille.

    A PHCF project with NYCHA and genEquality, funded by the Pershing Square Foundation · Read the story

  3. Aerial view of the Seven Stars Court at Tilden Houses, a deep blue court painted with large white seven-pointed stars, surrounded by brick towers and trees

    2026 · Brownsville, Brooklyn

    The Seven Stars Court

    Hoopbus worked with Tilden Houses residents, the Office of Neighborhood Safety and the Neighborhood Safety Initiatives team to refurbish its first court in Brooklyn. The seven stars belong to Brownsville. The court is part of NeighborhoodStat, under the Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety, which has worked to strengthen wellbeing in NYCHA developments since 2018.

    Court by Hoopbus · Photo by Tameek Williams

What waiting looks like

Two hundred and fifty more.

These are the courts at Roosevelt Houses in Brooklyn, photographed this year. Cracked slabs, patched seams, lines worn down to a suggestion, one backboard still up and holding. Kids play here anyway. This is the condition most NYCHA courts are in, and it is the whole reason the campaign exists.

A cracked, unpainted concrete court at Roosevelt Houses with faded markings, pigeons gathered at one end and a tower block behind
Roosevelt Houses, Brooklyn.
The far end of the Roosevelt Houses court, patched grey concrete with a single backboard and a faint yellow key line
The same court, looking toward DeKalb Avenue.

A court in this condition is not a lost cause. It is a line item.

A wide view of the worn court at McKinley Houses, grey asphalt with faded red and yellow markings and bare trees overhead
McKinley Houses, before.
A worn asphalt court at Sheepshead Bay Houses covered in fallen leaves, with faded red paint and white lines
Sheepshead Bay Houses, before.

Both of these courts looked like Roosevelt does now. Both have since been restored. That is the whole argument: the difference between these photographs and a playable court is money and a decision, and most courts land somewhere around $100,000.

A team sport.

Every court on this page took a roster. Residents decide what gets built; from there it takes designers, painters, contractors, city agencies, funders and the people who show up to run the games afterwards. Some of these names worked on the courts above. Others have been quietly rebuilding NYCHA courts for years.

Residents, first

  • The resident associations at Pomonok, Patterson, Harborview Terrace and Tilden Houses
  • The 200-plus Pomonok residents who chose a court over everything else on the list
  • The 100-plus volunteers who rebuilt Harborview Terrace by hand

Design and build

  • Hoopbus
  • Project Backboard, whose open-source refurbishment manuals are what Hoopbus points new builders to
  • NYCHA's Capital Projects Division
  • Hester Street
  • Design Trust for Public Space
  • genEquality and its Nudge Art program
  • Artolution
  • Kompan

Safety and the neighborhood

  • The Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety and NeighborhoodStat
  • The Office of Neighborhood Safety and the Neighborhood Safety Initiatives team
  • Center for Justice Innovation
  • The NYPD and the Manhattan District Attorney's office, whose asset-forfeiture funding rebuilt fifteen NYCHA courts
  • The Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice

Play, after the ribbon

  • Madison Square Garden Sports and the Jr. Knicks
  • House of Mandela, who brought the league idea to NYCHA
  • NYC Parks

The money

  • The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, behind PHCF's Green Space Connections program
  • The Pershing Square Foundation, at Harborview Terrace
  • The Mellon Foundation, for the artists
  • Council members who have put district money into their own courts
  • The Coney and the Isaiah Whitehead Foundation, at Surfside Gardens in Coney Island
  • Under Armour, the NBA and Kemba Walker, who came back and rebuilt his home court at Sack Wern in 2013

This list is not finished, and neither is the work. If your organization has restored a NYCHA court, or wants to, tell us and we'll add you to the roster.

Come play
with us.

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