User:BGinOC/Irvington Tennis Club

The Irvington Club was established in 1897 in the Irvington neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. The club is in its second hundred years as the neighborhood's center for recreation and socialization. One of the oldest tennis clubs in the country, this member-owned complex offers indoor and outdoor tennis, swimming, exercise facilities, and a community room. Historic photographs of the club are featured in the clubhouse lounge area.

"Tennis in Portland has at last awakened" proclaimed the Irvington Club's first brochure over 100 years ago. At that time, one year after it was founded in 1898, the Irvington Club consisted of "one first class clay tennis court at the end of the Irvington car line." in 1905, the club bought its current site and built permanent courts and a clubhouse building. The club owned the entire block, and the north half was devoted to a public park and playground. The oldest section of the existing clubhouse is the two story corner building designed by noted Portland architect (and early Irvington resident) Ellis F. Lawrence in 1912. It is one of only 5 Craftsman Style structures designed by Lawrence during his long career. As a result of the design by one of Oregon's most noted architects, this section of the Irvington Club buildings was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.

Unfortunately, economic hardship during the Great Depression forced the club to sell the north half of the block. The "Cape Cod Cottage" style houses on that half of the block were built between 1938 and 1940. But members had big plans: to build "at least two more courts and . . . Club house accommodations with shower and bath and lockers." The initiation fee had been set "at the very low sum of $2.50 with regular monthly dues of 25 cents per month.

The postwar years brought renewed prosperity to the club, which is now a thriving part of community life. A history of the club, its tournaments, and leading members titled The Club That Roared: 100 Years of the Irvington Club is available at local bookstores.

The Irvington Club has come a long way since those first tennis enthusiasts played on the one clay court which occupied donated land in the middle of the block between NE Tillamook and Hancock and 19th and 21st, in the heart of the Irvington neighborhood. Back then, spectators observed the action from the club's only building -- a set of covered bleachers. The soil there -- half sandy, half clay -- was perfect for tennis. While the modern game of lawn tennis had been developed in England not long before (in the early 1870s), to be played on the expansive grass lawns of England's upper class, clay soon became the most popular surface in the United States.

From its founding, the Irvington Club has always been member-owned. Soon, members decided to turn their club into the "tennis headquarters for the city." Spearheaded by club president Walter Goss, they raised $10,000 in one year through donations and the sale of lifetime memberships, and bought half of a nearby city block at the club's present location between NE Brazee and Thompson and 21st and 22nd, enough land on which to build six clay courts and a clubhouse.

In February, 1905, The Oregonian described the club's location in Irvington -- at that time an attractive middle- to upper-middle class neighborhood -- as being "the prettiest spot in the pretty suburb." When the courts opened in July of 1905, the Oregon Journal declared that "the universal verdict was that Irvington has the finest courts in the great Western world." By September of that year, finishing touches had been put on the one-story clubhouse, which included a roof garden, 20 feet in width and extending the full length of the building -- a most advantageous place to observe the courts. The six courts and clubhouse marked the opening of Portland's first tennis-only club. In 1908 the club bought the north end of the block and turned it into a neighborhood playground. Four years later a two-story addition to the clubhouse, designed by Portland architect Ellis Lawrence, was constructed.

Not only was the Irvington Club to be a center for tennis, it would serve the community "as a country club as well." Prospective members were invited to join a club that would "take a prominent part in the civic life of our city. All that pertains to good government, good streets, good citizenship, good morals, good homes, good men, good women, good boys and girls, should be fostered by our Club. This enterprise and all that it means for good is not for today but for all time."

These lofty goals included, of course, fostering good tennis. In 1899, the Irvington Club sponsored the first Oregon State Tennis Tournament, held on two courts at Multnomah Field. Many of the Pacific Northwest's best players from 1900 to the late 1970s came out of the Irvington Club, including Phil Neer, who was National Intercollegiate singles champion in 1921, Wayne Sabin and  Elwood Cooke, both of whom played on the U.S. Davis Cup team and were ranked in the top ten players in the country in the late 1930s and '40s, and Carolyn Lumber, ranked number one in the Pacific Northwest in 1975.