Handball’s Hold Over the Big Apple
By Isabel Ozkan Jordan
Handball should be an exciting sport for urbanists. With simple equipment and a flexible, utilitarian architecture, handball courts are sculptures of urbanist realism that serve as monuments to material and spatial efficiency. According to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, more than 535 locations host over 1,940 courts across the city. Whether utilizing existing walls of buildings or standing tall on their own, handball walls are omnipresent features of playgrounds and public schoolyards. Plain pizza slices and subway rides, sometimes used as city-wide standards to represent cheapness or to measure inflation, continue to exceed the cost of handballs, which run about $2.00 at delis and dollar stores.
Note: North of the city, the sport that New Yorkers call handball is more often recognized as “wall ball.” This game differs significantly from the European and Olympic events.
History, Art, and Nostalgia
With its visual simplicity and fleeting, explosive choreography, handball is a unique and spontaneous dance set against stark geometric backdrops, textured paint, and timeworn concrete. Introduced to New York by Irish immigrants in the 19th century, and cemented in relevance by the Work Project Administration’s widespread construction of public courts during the Great Depression, the sport is intertwined with a thoroughly working-class urban identity.
Post-war suburban migration and white flight transformed the demographics of New York, yet handball remained an enduring presence for new immigrants and the communities that did not—or could not—leave. In the wake of population loss, federal disinvestment, and other disruptions to the social fabric, these courts became public altarpieces, embodying a rooted resilience within the city’s built forms.
A secondary effect of handball’s strong physical presence in New York is its role in the city’s heritage and cultural production, including hosting some of the legendary mural work of the artist-activist Keith Haring.
Clusters or Ubiquity?
Upon exploring the characteristics of handball court locations, one major point became clear: across boroughs and neighborhood typologies, handball is present. In some older and denser neighborhoods, it is ubiquitous.
Map 2 visualizes 400 meter buffers around each handball court, a length symbolizing walking distance of five-seven minutes for the average person. By delineating these buffers on each court location in the city, the map shows a range of geographic accessibility to handball courts and to NYC Parks properties.
While some large parks, including Pelham Bay Park and Van Cortlandt Park, are home to handball courts, the vast majority of them are located in mid-block parks and school playgrounds. These small parks can be unsung heroes for residents distant from the city’s expansive and well-forested titans—or for those with only a small bit of time or mobility to enjoy their local green space. Different types of parks serve different purposes: some might be day trips, meant to be explored over the course of several hours, and serve the city as hubs of nature and ecology. Other parks are casual, meant for simple everyday pleasures like sitting on a bench, playing dominoes, or whacking a handball. These serve residents at the neighborhood, rather than regional, level.
The areas with the highest density of handball courts can be called clusters. Even before measuring clusters scientifically, a few are apparent to the eye. As shown in Map 2b, areas encompassing Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant on the left and Harlem and the South Bronx on the right featured the highest number of handball courts. These neighborhoods share rich histories, medium-to-high densities, and apartment typologies. Primarily developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these areas absorbed working-class communities desiring more space with transit access to jobs in commercial Manhattan. Further flung neighborhoods, mostly developed in the mid-20th century, responded through design to the rise of automobiles. These types of areas, like Bayside or Gerritsen Beach, are characterized by detached single-family homes, semi-attached houses, and garden apartments, reflecting a different style of New York development than that of the closest ring around the urban core. Outer neighborhoods feature significantly lower population density and less rigid street grids, and such differences were entrenched, enforced, and ensured by the 1961 New York City Zoning Resolution.
Might these differing development timelines have something to do with the construction of handball courts?
If Map 2 clusters areas of high handball court density spatially, Map 3 visualizes income inequality across the city using census tract Median Household Income (MHI) embedded within the handball court layer.
Local Moran’s Index analysis identified four specific types of income clusters: high-high (HH), low-low (LL), high-low (HL), and low-high (LH). High-high clusters show areas with high MHI surrounded by areas of high MHI while low-low clusters highlight areas with low MHI surrounded by areas of low MHI. High-low clusters indicate transition or border zones where wealthier areas are adjacent to low-income neighborhoods, perhaps showing patterns of gentrification or differing levels of home ownership. Low-high clusters suggest isolated lower-income populations within wealthier areas, including public housing complexes located in census tracts with high MHIs.
The Local Moran’s Index of 0.199 indicates moderate spatial autocorrelation, with similar income levels are grouped more than would be expected under spatial randomness. The analysis is statistically robust, with a Z-score of 17.82 and a p-value effectively at zero, confirming that the clustering is highly significant and unlikely to result from chance. Compared to the Expected Index of -0.002, which represents a random spatial pattern, the observed clustering underscores the deeply rooted and non-random spatial inequalities that shape New York City. As planners know well, New York’s extreme income inequality and racial segregation are anything but random.
Handball courts are highly flexible spaces. Might an area’s income relate to the use of handball courts and which sports users elect to play on them?
Heat and Social Vulnerability
According to the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention, social vulnerability refers to the factors that “adversely affect communities that encounter hazards and other community-level stressors.” Researchers cannot determine a neighborhood’s vulnerability to extreme heat, extreme weather events, and other climate change-related risks without the incorporation of social factors.
Based on “A Social Vulnerability Index for Disaster Management” published by the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management in 2011, Map 4 visualizes the spatial relationship between handball courts and census tracts using a custom Social Vulnerability Index (SVI).
The SVI incorporates rigorously cleaned and reorganized census data, including Median Household Income (MHI), percent of residents utilizing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the percentage of residents living in limited English households (defined as households where no person over the age of fourteen is very comfortable speaking English). Because these social factors correlate strongly with limited economic resources and access to services, they were weighed most heavily as barriers to climate adaptation. Educational attainment was another factor used in the index, albeit weighed less strongly.
Environmental factors incorporated into the SVI are a raster of the city’s tree canopy, which contributes to heat mitigation while absorbing excess water, and a raster of surface temperatures, collected by LiDAR in summer 2024, indicating areas prone to higher heat. Zonal statistics tools created average tree coverage and average surface temperature values for each census tract.
The factors are weighted based on statistical analysis of their influence on climate resilience. MHI, SNAP participation, language barriers, and heat exposure contribute most to the vulnerability score, identifying areas where socioeconomic and environmental stressors compound risk. Further research would benefit from exploring the roles that small parks play in offering relief from heat or flood mitigation in areas scoring SVIs of 2 and 3—and what potential within these spaces are yet to be unlocked.
Isabel Ozkan Jordan is a graduate of the urban planning program and a Community Planning Fellow at the Fund for the City of New York. Her upcoming projects explore housing affordability and the role of culture in the design and use of the built environment.
