Technically, it wasn’t a castle castle. It was a 5,000-square-foot neo-Georgian building in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, built in 1927, that once housed the New York and Brooklyn Casket Company and later housed the South Oxford Tennis Club, for a while the only African-American-owned tennis club in New York City.
The club was at once stately, refined, rowdy, and way more down-to-earth than all that. What started out as a Brooklyn hot spot for matches on green Har-Tru clay would become, during its 16-year existence, a focal point for the surrounding, predominantly black neighborhoods. It was a place where kids could take free lessons, members competed in tournaments, future hip-hop legends spit rhymes, folks marked important occasions, politicians held fund-raisers, and the area’s gay community found an unlikely locus.
The man at the center of it all was Richard Northern, a tennis fanatic with an entrepreneur’s soul, who spent a good chunk of his life keeping his dream alive.
The man at the center of it all was Richard Northern, a tennis fanatic with an entrepreneur’s soul, who spent a good chunk of his life keeping his dream alive.