This year marks a new chapter in professional tennis in Newport, Rhode Island, where lawn tennis was first introduced to the American continent. For the first time, the Hall of Fame Open will include competition by both men and women, who will be competing for equal monetary prizes.

This competition is the only ATP and WTA tournament played on grass in North America and continues the tradition of tennis, which was first played on grass at the Wimbledon Cricket Club in 1877. Just four years later, in 1881, the first American championship was played in Newport, RI, marking the beginning of tennis in the Americas. The American championship (now called the US Open) was held in Newport from 1881 until 1914. In 1915 it was moved to the West Side Tennis Club to be closer to New York.

This year, the tournament will be held from Sunday, July 6, to Sunday, July 13, 2025. The competition will combine a Men’s Challenger (ATP 125) tournament and a professional Women’s (WTA 125) competition, with both singles and doubles championships. Unlike in past years—when the tournament occurred immediately after the completion of Wimbledon—this year, the event will take place simultaneously with the second week of Wimbledon. As a result, the Hall of Fame Open will not have players coming directly from that tournament, as it has in the past. (More information on the draw and tickets is available at HallOfFameOpen.com.)

Newport Tennis Hall of Fame hosts the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP).

When the Newport Casino was first built in 1880, lawn tennis was a new but rapidly growing sport. The game had been derived from the more complex and architecturally involved game now known as Real Tennis, which originated in 13th-century France. To make the sport of “tennis” more accessible and affordable, Major Walter Wingfield distilled the essence of the game—hitting a ball over a net with wooden racquets—and was granted a patent for his new variation by Queen Victoria in 1874.

The Newport Casino was commissioned in 1879 by James Gordon Bennett, who owned an estate across the street. He reportedly created the club after members of the Reading Room Club objected to his polo instructor riding a horse up the staircase to the second floor of the building on a bet. Bennett, an eccentric millionaire and publisher of the New York Herald, was famous for doing exactly as he pleased. He supposedly said he created the club so people could “have a bit of fun,” implying that such fun had previously been missing in Newport. After a lightning-fast six-month design process, construction on the Newport Casino began on January 8, 1880. Thanks to the efforts of 200–300 construction laborers, the facility opened to patrons in July of that same year.

Bennett selected the newly restructured firm of McKim, Mead & White to undertake the design work. With the addition of Stanford White, the firm completed design for the Newport Casino within 6 months and began its rapid rise in prominence. The project received wide coverage, as Newport was closely followed in both the social and architectural press of the time.

The Tennis International Hall of Fame sitting on Bellevue Avenue in Newport. Photo by Ross Cann, AIA

Located at 194 Bellevue Avenue, the Casino building is a masterpiece of the “Shingle Style,” which was popular during the 1880s. The Shingle Style was named by Yale architectural scholar Vincent Scully in his seminal 1955 work The Stick Style and the Shingle Style. As Scully described it, the style was a refined and simplified version of the earlier Queen Anne Revival, which had featured more polychromy and half-timbering. The Shingle Style used cedar shingles cut in various patterns to create an almost painterly cloak over its asymmetrical, free-form volumes—thus giving the style its descriptive name.

Lawn tennis at the Newport Casino.

The Casino (meaning “little house,” not “place of gambling,” in those days) represented a new kind of leisure facility, with dining, sporting, and other amenities under one roof—what would later become known as the “country club.” This magnificent complex has been preserved thanks to the vision and generosity of summer Newporters James and Candace Van Alen, who saved the site from being turned into a strip shopping center in 1954 by repurposing it as the Lawn Tennis Hall of Fame. In 1973, induction into the institution was expanded to include international players, and in 1976 it was renamed the International Tennis Hall of Fame (ITHF). Today, this grand complex houses one of the world’s central collections of tennis history and memorabilia, including the original patent signed by Queen Victoria for the invention of lawn tennis.

For its importance in the career of McKim, Mead & White, its contribution to the development of the American Shingle Style, and its role in the invention of the “country club,” the Casino complex was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987. From its earliest days to the present, it has been closely associated with tennis in America through the Hall of Fame and the many great players enshrined in this pantheon of the sport. This venue deserves a wonderful summer tournament to continue the great tradition of tennis in Newport—and it will hopefully remain recognized as the American temple to tennis far into the future.

View looking east from the porch. Photo by Ross Cann, AIA

A4 Architecture is proud to have completed five separate projects on the Newport Casino campus. If you have a historical structure in New England that deserves expert architectural attention and design, please reach out to us. We’d love to learn more about your building and project and help guide you in its renovation or restoration. We look forward to being in touch soon.

Ross Sinclair Cann, AIA is an, historian, educator and practicing architect living and working in Newport. He is the Founding Principal of A4 Architecture. He holds architecture degrees from Yale, Cambridge and Columbia Universities and is former president of the National Tennis Club located at the Newport Casino and has had a box for the ATP tournament for nearly twenty years.