Each September, the U.S. Open tennis finals draw two distinct crowds to Flushing, Queens — one arriving by subway with a hundred dollars and a willingness to watch from a screen, the other arriving with twenty thousand dollars and an expectation of seamless luxury. The distance between them is not measured in miles but in the architecture of American aspiration. Major sporting events have long served as mirrors of economic stratification, and the Open's tiered pricing structure makes that reflection unusually legible — preserving a public face while engineering a private one.