Who Owns Forest Hills Stadium? A Tennis Club, a Licence, and a Concert Business

Forest Hills Stadium is one of the few American concert venues whose control structure has been litigated in public, which means the record here is unusually good on the layer that is usually opaque — who is permitted to run the concerts — and unusually thin on the layer that is usually easy, namely who holds title.

The stadium stands on club grounds

The West Side Tennis Club, founded in the nineteenth century and the former home of the U.S. Open, presents the 1923 stadium as a venue on its grounds with a concert capacity in the region of 14,000. The club is a membership nonprofit, and the concert business at the stadium is a source of revenue for it rather than its purpose.

The licence: nonprofit to for-profit operator

A 2026 decision of the New York Appellate Division, in the dispute brought over stadium concerts, records that the nonprofit defendant licenses the stadium to a for-profit corporation to operate concerts. A licence is the weakest of the occupancy verbs — weaker than a lease, far weaker than a deed — and it is the right word for a seasonal concert operation on a club's grounds. That single sentence in a court record does more to explain the venue's structure than any promotional page about it.

AEG's listing is a promotion relationship

AEG lists Forest Hills Stadium within its music division. That is good evidence of a booking and promotion role and of a commercial interest in the venue's calendar; it is not evidence of real-estate title, and this publication does not infer ownership from a portfolio page. The distinction is the same one documented at Red Rocks, where promoters change from show to show above a municipal owner that never changes.

What this dossier deliberately leaves open

Live Index does not name the concert operator beyond what the appellate record states, and does not name a deed owner of record. Local reporting has attributed the concert operation to a named production company, and the register entry at Forest Hills Stadium notes that the operator and promoter roles are not fully reconciled in the public record. Marking a role as unreconciled is a finding, not an omission: it tells a reader exactly how far the documents go, which is the point of the role matrix below.