Why you should experience La Cienega Tennis Center in Los Angeles, California.
La Cienega Tennis Center is a storied public tennis complex where La Cienega Park's nearly century-old recreational tradition meets championship-era reservoir courts, sixteen lighted playing surfaces and one of Beverly Hills' longest-running public racquet programs.
Set along South La Cienega Boulevard near Olympic Boulevard and just steps from the former Beverly Hills Waterworks, the tennis center occupies the western half of a recreational landscape established during Beverly Hills' rapid growth in the late 1920s. Parallel rows of outdoor courts create an unusually concentrated field of play, with fencing separating simultaneous matches and tall lighting structures extending the visual rhythm above the baselines. The hard surfaces produce the quick bounce and dependable footing associated with Southern California public tennis, supporting everything from extended baseline rallies to serve-and-volley practice. Courts remain active into the evening under installed lighting, preserving the center's emphasis on sustained daily play across a substantial number of simultaneous matches. The result is a La Cienega Park tennis complex whose scale and long sporting continuity give public play a presence more commonly associated with private racquet clubs.
What you should know about La Cienega Tennis Center.
La Cienega Tennis Center is best known for carrying forward a public tennis tradition that began when Beverly Hills established La Cienega Park in 1928 with tennis courts among an unusually broad collection of recreational facilities. The park soon expanded around the Beverly Hills Water Treatment Plant, and courts constructed above its reservoir became known as the Reservoir Courts. International tennis tournaments used those courts for three decades, connecting the municipal complex with competitive tennis far beyond ordinary neighborhood recreation. Their first configuration disappeared when a parking structure replaced the earlier reservoir arrangement, then tennis returned during the 1980s with courts rebuilt above the new structure, preserving the unusual stacking of recreation over infrastructure. Beverly Hills Tennis assumed the teaching concession at La Cienega Tennis Center in 1995 and developed a program encompassing private instruction, junior and adult classes, camps and USTA-sanctioned tournaments. The United States Tennis Association subsequently honored La Cienega Tennis Center and Beverly Hills Tennis among the nation's Outstanding Public Tennis Facilities, giving formal recognition to a municipal operation with roots extending back to the park's earliest years. Another substantial intervention arrived in 2010 with a reconstruction and modernization of the center's locker facilities. Racquet use entered a new phase in 2025 when Beverly Hills approved conversion of three La Cienega tennis courts for pickleball, placing the historic tennis complex inside the broader shift toward multiple racquet sports without erasing the sporting tradition established on this site in 1928.
Sixteen lighted outdoor courts formed the center's longstanding playing configuration, creating enough simultaneous court activity for individual instruction, group classes, tournament draws and recreational matches to coexist within one complex. Beverly Hills Tennis built its instructional operation around four courts dedicated to private lessons during operating hours, then expanded coaching through more than 90 hours of adult and junior group classes. Junior camps add concentrated seasonal training, and USTA-sanctioned competitions move players from instructional drills into structured match play on the same grounds. Scott Crichlow represents the program's connection with higher competitive levels: after playing collegiate tennis for Seton Hall, competing in Futures and Challenger events and working as a hitting partner for Chinese Federation Cup players at the 2000 U.S. Open and Vince Spadea at the 2001 U.S. Open, he joined Beverly Hills Tennis in 2003 and later coached players on the ATP Tour. Ball-machine sessions introduce repetitive stroke work on a dedicated court, complementing coached instruction with independently controlled pace and placement. The combination of extensive court inventory, organized teaching, junior development, sanctioned competition and coaches with professional-tour experience gives the center a complete pathway from casual hitting through serious competitive training.
How to fold La Cienega Tennis Center into your trip.
La Cienega Tennis Center works as the recreational anchor for an outing along La Cienega and Wilshire that follows Southern California architecture through disguised civic engineering, the rise of the movie palace and the reinvention of an automobile-age department store as a museum of cinema.
Begin at Margaret Herrick Library, housed immediately beside the courts inside the former Beverly Hills Waterworks completed in 1928 from civil engineer Arthur Taylor's design for Salisbury, Bradshaw & Taylor. Romanesque and Moorish forms concealed industrial machinery behind an ecclesiastical exterior, with a tower disguising part of the purification system; after the plant closed in 1976 and faced demolition, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences converted it into the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study, opening there in 1991 with its film library and archival collections. Continue to Saban Theatre, opened as the Fox Wilshire Theatre on September 19, 1930 from a design by prolific theater architect S. Charles Lee. Conceived with 2,500 seats for motion pictures and vaudeville, the building captured Lee's transition into Art Deco through its rotunda lobby, auditorium and silver, gold and black decorative scheme, then survived changing entertainment formats to host premieres, concerts and theatrical productions under later names. Conclude at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where Albert C. Martin Sr. and Samuel Marx's 1939 May Company building joined Renzo Piano's new spherical structure in a film museum opened in 2021. The original Streamline Moderne department store used sweeping horizontal lines and a cylindrical corner clad with 350,000 gold-backed glass mosaic tiles to command the attention of motorists; the museum project restored that automobile-age structure and connected it by glass bridges to Piano's 45,000-square-foot Sphere Building. The progression moves from Taylor's architectural concealment of municipal engineering through S. Charles Lee's Art Deco movie palace into Martin, Marx and Piano's successive reinvention of commercial architecture for cinema, tracing how the streets beyond La Cienega Tennis Center became a concentrated corridor of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Los Angeles design.
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