The Hands Behind New York City’s Hoop Dreams

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It’s orange, round, and 18 inches across. It’s in every New York City public basketball court, yet most aren’t exactly the same.

At dozens of courts across the five boroughs, countless players have chucked millions of balls at, into and sometimes through hundreds of steel hoops handmade by a handful of blacksmiths in a Parks Department workshop.

“The circle doesn’t just form itself — we form it,” said 36-year-old blacksmith Giovanni Romano. “Is there a machine that can probably make it? I mean, yeah … But this is just the way it’s been done.”

Inside a red, metal-lined shack hidden from plain sight along the Flushing Meadows Corona Park rim, a large welding table anchors the workshop where Romano and three other Parks blacksmiths fabricate basketball hoops for city parks the old-fashioned way.

Nearby, a large American flag adorns the wall in the space where the four native New Yorkers also make barbecue grills and lifeguard chairs for public parks, beaches and pools.

“When I was a little kid just driving through the city with my parents and seeing construction sites and big cranes, I would go, ‘Oh wow, look at that,’” Romano said. “Then I became an ironworker, and I did that. And then I came here, and we’re doing rims, we’re doing pools.”

Romano and 43-year-old Rob Valenti had met as ironworkers on city buildings and bridges, while 40-year-old Andre Emilien helped put together the city’s gas pipes. Chris Claiborne, 44, worked on gratings and railings at NYCHA developments. But all of them managed to find their way to the shack, the birthplace of many city hoops.

The rims begin with a solid, cylindrical steel stock that’s cut to a length of 58.5 inches. Then it is fed and cranked through a roller, where indented wheels bend it into a crescent shape. The crescent then lands on an anvil mounted atop the trunk of a tree cut down in the Flushing park, and a blacksmith hammers it into a near-perfect hoop before transferring it over to a welding table.

Orange sparks danced off that table as a sharp blue light marked where Romano joined the hoop onto slabs of metal, which the blacksmiths had cut and shaped to form an anchor that would be bolted onto a backboard.

The process can burn your eyes without proper protective gear, Valenti warned. “It’s like an ultraviolet light,” Claiborne added. “It’s like the solar eclipse — a mini version of it.”

“It feels good thinking and knowing that they’re in the park, and kids are using it,” Valenti said of the handmade rims. “A lot of great basketball players that came out of New York played on these hoops, so that’s pretty cool.”

An Endangered Craft

In the nearly 140 years since the game of basketball was first introduced to New York City , it’s become the city’s quintessential sport — one that needs nothing more than a ball to bounce on flat ground along with a backboard and a rim.

But without the rim, there’s no game at all.

The handmade rims the city blacksmiths make are notoriously unforgiving, with their solid steel sending missed shots flying.

“I did not like playing basketball growing up,” said Emilien, who played in uptown Manhattan as a kid. “You don’t really put any thought into that unless you play basketball for real or you end up making them — and now I know why those balls can fly so far.”

But the rims he makes are becoming rarities as the Parks Department now puts up cheaper, factory-manufactured rings at new street courts and those receiving full renovations — turning to handmade hoops only when the old ones need replacing.

That means the shop no longer makes as many hoops as it once did. The blacksmiths had made about 30 of them so far this year, Valenti estimated, and those will withstand all kinds of use, like when New Yorkers use them as dead-hang or pull-up bars.

“The lifespan of a basketball hoop could be a hundred years,” said Romano. “The only way they come down is if someone takes them down, or if they’re repairing a park. It’s not breaking from just wear and tear.”

On a spring Tuesday, a crew of four maintenance workers installed eight new, pre-manufactured rims across four freshly painted basketball courts at Dr. Charles R. Drew Park in South Jamaica.

But where did the old rims go?

“The dumpster,” said Chris Gruver, a 54-year-old supervisor of mechanics. Another supervisor chimed in, chuckling: “Either that or the recycling plant.”

‘They Were Terrible’

At the West Fourth Street Courts in Greenwich Village, the rims are now machine jobs. But some players and spectators still carry with them memories of the blacksmiths’ handmade hoops — even the famously challenging double-rimmed ones the Parks Department discontinued decades ago.

That includes 70-year-old Vincent Matos, one of the “old heads” who remains a near-daily presence at the court that’s commonly known as the Cage.

Matos had spent much of his youth sharpening his shot on handmade hoops across the city, he said — from Co-Op City and Webster Avenue in The Bronx to Spanish Harlem and as far down as Battery Park in Manhattan.

These days, Matos runs a basketball team — for “young inner city teenagers committed to rising above their adversities” — called the New York Sky Risers .

“Basketball was a tool,” to relieve pressure and build community, said Matos.. “And now it’s a way for me to communicate with the youth — to save lives, even.”

Across the court, 24-year-old Travis Elmore, a recently graduated Division-2 college player, awaited a worthy match.

The six-foot-six-inch power forward grew up playing on the courts of Harlem, he said, brushing up his skills on the handmade, no-net, double-rimmed hoops that hurled failed shots aggressively in unpredictable directions.

“Oh my gosh, they were terrible. I hate playing on the double rims,” Elmore recalled. But knowing those had been hand-made, he said, “makes me want to take care of the rims a lot more, you know?”

As for Matos, he recalled learning to play ball at eight years old while growing up in an orphanage in Rockland County and then turning to the city courts for an “escape from reality” as he grew up in a  group home in The Bronx.

“This is an escape for a lot of people,” he said. “You can come here and be whoever you want. It doesn’t matter, because you get treated the same. Here, you are all equal.”

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