With the move to Flushing Meadows, what had been Singer Stadium, from the 1964 World’s Fair, became Louis Armstrong Stadium, with the Grandstand slapped inelegantly onto the side of it. The whole thing looked makeshift and dated even before Jimmy Conners beat Bjorn Borg in the first Flushing final.

But the place took tennis out of the country club, literally, and while it wasn’t beautiful, it worked, improbably well, like so much of the city, all the more so by comparison with cavernous Arthur Ashe Stadium, which rose in 1997 to capitalize on the sport’s popularity and the profitability of luxury booths.

Ashe has been an unlovable building, and it’s a pity to add a roof to it now instead of tearing the whole thing down and starting from scratch. But it at least has had the virtue of reinforcing the Grandstand as an insiders’ favorite whose intimacy harks back to the old Forest Hills days. As countless players point out, that intimacy intensifies matches for both them and fans. It is the court where many of the tightest early-round matches unfold. Ashe hosts the blowouts by top seeds.

The other day, while Querrey was falling to Mannarino (who would fall to Roger Federer on Saturday night in one of those Ashe blowouts), I joined a few fans who had climbed to the top row at Armstrong to look through the railing back down onto the Grandstand. David Ferrer was closing out his fellow Spaniard Roberto Bautista on Armstrong. The view, onto two courts at once, is one of the quirks of the place, exploited by fans who, like players, try to work the angles — the same sort who watched Mets games at Shea Stadium from the No. 7 Willets Point subway station, to avoid paying for tickets.

Shea provoked a memoir by an English professor at Hofstra University, Dana Brand, after it was torn down a few years ago. It might seem the least likely stadium to inspire warm reveries — a joyless, windswept wreck and critical piñata by the end — but Mr. Brand, who grew up rooting for the Mets there, noted a basic truth about architecture. Buildings, like cities, are receptacles of shared memory. Stadiums link millions of strangers who retain memories of watching games in them. As Mr. Brand wrote: “People who share these things with me are not entirely strangers, even if I have never seen them before, even if I will never meet them.”

This Open, players, television announcers and veteran tennis watchers have been waxing nostalgic about the Grandstand, anticipating its demise. I caught the commentator, coach and retired player Brad Gilbert dashing out of the Grandstand after Querrey lost to Mannarino. With a brusque wave of his hand, he said the new Grandstand was necessary, that the current layout no longer works.