Celine Wallenhorst walked into Louis Armstrong Stadium for the first time ever on Tuesday and saw history for free. There, on the court below, Venus Williams teamed up with Reilly Opelka in the new mixed doubles event at the U.S. Open, an updated format that brought some of the best players in the world to compete in matches that are usually contested by relatively unknown specialists in front of a couple of hundred fans.
Ms. Wallenhorst, a schoolteacher living in New York, made the spontaneous decision to go to Queens and watch a roster of stars for the price of a subway ride.
“It’s actually pretty incredible,” she said, “because everything in New York is so expensive, but this is free.”
Traditionally, the week before the main tournament, known as Fan Week, features the qualifying rounds, a low-key roster of singles matches among lower-ranked players competing for the last spots in the Open. Fans are allowed in for free, and the week has evolved into a crowded, but still affordable, attraction.
This year, several matches, featuring big names like Novak Djokovic, Naomi Osaka and Carlos Alcaraz, were held on Tuesday of Fan Week in Arthur Ashe Stadium, where spectators paid for tickets; others were in Armstrong, where admission was free. The semifinals and final will be played tonight in Ashe, with paid admission.
The new mixed doubles innovation brought more energy and a buzz to Flushing Meadows. Still, for some purists, the main event of Fan Week remained the qualifying rounds, where fringe players pour everything they have in fierce battles on the outer courts, desperate to get into the main draw, which begins Sunday.
Christopher Winter, an unemployed former travel company worker from New York who has been coming to the qualifying rounds for years, was at Court 13 on Tuesday to watch a match between two women doing just that. He sat directly behind the coaches of one of the players, perhaps 10 feet from the court.
As the match progressed, roars rose from Ashe and wafted over to Court 13. Mr. Winter was not impressed with the new mixed doubles, where it takes only four games to win a set, another twist designed to streamline the event.
“It’s an exhibition, isn’t it?” he said. This was not the case, he suggested, on Court 13. “These people here are desperate to win.”
The new mixed doubles did feel a bit like an exhibition at times, where players have fun in the fast-paced setup, and might not be disconsolate if they lose. But it is real. Despite the radically different format, it will count in the record books, and the winners will split a $1 million prize.
The matches in Ashe, which was largely full, required tickets that ranged from about $25 to a couple of hundred dollars, far less than seats during the main two weeks of the U.S. Open.
The concession stands were still humming along for profit, too, with fans waiting in lines to pay some notably high prices, like $26 for chicken nuggets or $23 for the Open’s signature cocktail, the Honey Deuce. The relative affordability of Fan Week was the very issue that Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, wanted to highlight on his visit to the site on Monday.
Mr. Mamdani swept through the busy grounds late that afternoon with security guards and campaign workers. At one point he was stopped by a man he clearly knew. They hugged and the man asked him, “What are you doing here?”
“Watching the quallies,” Mr. Mamdani said with a smile.
Mr. Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary in June and leads in the polls, was greeted warmly by many fans, although one muttered “communist” as he passed by. He was introduced to a group of about two dozen unionized U.S. Open workers, who cheered, while a couple of people nearby booed.
Emma Hall-Martin, a screenwriter and film director living in New York, heard through social media that Mr. Mamdani would be at the Open, and went with her sister and their father to meet him.
“I begged her to vote for him in the primary,” Ms. Hall-Martin said of her sister.
Another tennis fan, Francisco del Rosario, an Uber driver from Brooklyn, waved to the candidate from the top of the stands, but said he planned to vote for Mayor Eric Adams.
Mr. Mamdani, who said he is a table tennis player, wore a white dress shirt and tie as he watched some of the match between Mai Hontama of Japan and the American Kristina Penickova. He said he would love for the main tournament to be more accessible for regular New Yorkers.
“This is at the heart of the crisis of affordability in New York City,” he said. “You can see a glimpse of the city that could be, amidst the city that is.”
It was quintessential New York: crowded and expensive, with a couple of exceptions, if you know where to look.