Lawn tennis arrived in America in 1874, and within six years a group of residents in South Orange, New Jersey had decided the sport was serious enough to warrant a proper club. On October 4, 1880, with Richard J. Cross as its first president, the Orange Lawn Tennis Club was founded on a 10-acre site at the corner of Berkley Avenue and Montrose Avenue. By April 1882, the club had eight courts and about 100 members — numbers that reflected a game spreading rapidly through the social networks of Gilded Age New Jersey. The Orange club would go on to help found the United States Tennis Association, host a U.S. National Championship, and outlast nearly every peer institution from its era, surviving into the 21st century as one of the vanishingly rare American clubs that still maintained grass courts.
In May 1881, just seven months after the Orange Lawn Tennis Club was founded, it became one of the founding members of the United States National Lawn Tennis Association — the organization that would eventually become the United States Tennis Association, governing body of American tennis to this day. The club's involvement was substantive: Samuel Campbell, a member of Orange Lawn, served as the association's first vice-president. The founding of the USNLTA was itself a direct response to the sport's rapid growth and the need for standardized rules, a national ranking system, and a body to organize national championships. Orange Lawn was part of that founding conversation from the beginning, one of the original clubs that decided the sport needed governance at the national level.
In 1887, the Orange Lawn Tennis Club hosted the men's doubles event of what was then called the U.S. National Championship — the tournament we know today as the US Open. Hosting a national championship event in the sport's early decades was a statement of a club's prestige and facilities; Orange Lawn had earned that standing. The club also hosted the Eastern Grass Court Championships for decades, as well as a rotating calendar of regional and national tournaments. The American Zone final of the 1946 Davis Cup — the first Davis Cup played after World War II — was held at the club, where the United States defeated Mexico 5-0. That postwar Davis Cup final made Orange Lawn the site of one of the sport's great international competitions at a moment when competitive tennis was resuming after years of interruption.
By 1916, the original Berkley Avenue site had become inadequate. Demand for more courts and better facilities led the club to purchase the 42-acre Hillside estate on Ridgewood Avenue from H. Charles Hoskier, a former club president — a transaction that kept the club in the family, so to speak. The estate's main house became the clubhouse, and the grounds were converted to accommodate the courts. Moving to a 42-acre property gave the club room to expand while maintaining the grass court surface that defined its competitive identity. At a moment when most clubs were converting to harder surfaces for practicality, Orange Lawn retained grass — a choice that became increasingly rare as the decades passed.
By the time the club was purchased in 2018 by a group of investors led by real estate developer Bruce Schonbraun, it was one of the few clubs in the United States to still maintain grass courts at all. Grass courts are expensive and labor-intensive; they require constant mowing, rolling, and careful management of soil moisture to produce a playable surface. Most clubs abandoned them when synthetic alternatives proved easier to maintain and more consistent in play. Orange Lawn's persistence with grass gave it a distinctive character — and an anachronistic charm. The tournaments it hosted over its 140-year history rotated through names and sponsors: the Eastern Grass Court Championships became the Marlboro Open Championships in 1970, and the Tennis Week Open, the Orange Spring Tournament, and others cycled through as professional and amateur tennis reorganized itself across the decades. Through all of it, the grass remained.
Coordinates: 40.7545°N, 74.263°W, in South Orange, New Jersey, part of the Essex County townships known as the Oranges. The club sits on Ridgewood Avenue approximately 8 miles west of Newark Liberty International Airport (KEWR). At 2,000-3,000 feet, the South Orange residential landscape is visible — large wooded lots with older estates. The Oranges sit at the foot of the Watchung Ridge, whose forested escarpment is prominent from the air.