Tennis History | Shady Rest, Scotch Plains — the circuit that did its own inviting, 1921 to 1948

When a sport's tournaments are held at private clubs, the clubs decide who plays. Black players in the United States answered that by building a second national championship and a circuit of clubs to hold it in. The American Tennis Association was founded in Washington on 25 November 1916 by representatives of about a dozen African-American tennis clubs. It ran its first national championship the following year at Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, won by Talley Holmes, one of the founders. The ATA was not a protest organisation. It was an entry system, built because the existing one was closed. Shady Rest is what one of its host clubs looks like on the ground. The property had operated as the Westfield Country Club from about 1900, and on 28 July 1921 it was bought by the Progressive Realty Corporation, a group of African-American investors, and reopened as a members' club. By the 1940s it held six clay tennis courts with bleachers, and it served for a period as the ATA's headquarters. It hosted the ATA-sanctioned Eastern Open Championship from 28 July to 1 August 1948. John Shippen, the first American-born professional golfer, was the club professional and groundskeeper here from 1931 until 1964. Two cautions about what can and cannot be said of this place. The tennis record rests largely on the account published by the preservation trust that campaigns for the site, which carries no footnotes; the ATA's own tournament records for these years were not consulted for this entry. And the widely repeated claim that Althea Gibson played tennis and took up golf at Shady Rest is reported by that same trust without a citation. It is plausible and it is not established here. Scotch Plains Township bought the property in 1938 and leased it to the club. The club closed in 1964, after which the township ran the course as Scotch Hills Country Club until 2021, when the Shady Rest name was restored. The courts are gone. The trust places them where the ninth green now lies, which would put them a short distance from the clubhouse, on ground that no longer shows them. The clubhouse survives and is the oldest part of the site. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 7 July 2022, reference 100007869, and documented by the Historic American Landscapes Survey as HALS NJ-8 under the 2021 survey theme of historic Black landscapes. Coordinate: 40.65600, -74.37250, precision radius 200 m. Two independent sources agree closely: the HALS NJ-8 record at the Library of Congress gives 40.656057, -74.372633, and the GPS tag on the cover photograph gives 40.655806, -74.372278, about 41 m apart. The US Census Bureau geocode of 820 Jerusalem Road falls 568 m away, which is a road-network interpolation across a golf course rather than a second reading of the building, and it was set aside for that reason. The pin is the clubhouse, not the vanished courts. Cover: The Shady Rest clubhouse, photographed by the Wikimedia contributor Zeete on 30 July 2022, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. The picture shows the clubhouse, a commemorative boulder and an interpretive panel; the sign in frame commemorates John Shippen and golf, and no tennis court is visible anywhere in it.