City to Shut Downtown’s Only Indoor Tennis By Ronald Drenger Unless its owners can extract a last-minute reprieve from the city, Downtown’s only indoor tennis facility, a staple of the Lower Manhattan waterfront for 30 years, will close on July 31. The city wants to evict the Wall Street Racquet Club from Piers 13 and 14 on the East River, saying that the deterioration of the supporting piles has rendered the piers unsafe.   The club’s owners, citing engineering reports, say the piers are not in such bad shape—and, in any case, they’ve offered to raise the $5 million needed to stabilize them. In return, they want a five-year lease, but the city has said no. Last month, the owners sought Community Board 1’s support and found a receptive audience. "The government is spending millions of dollars to attract businesses to Lower Manhattan, and here we have a functioning business with a track record," said CB1 member Victor Papa. "What we don’t need is more abandoned city-owned property in Lower Manhattan," said Gary Fagin.   Downtown tennis players say they’re devastated. "It will be a tremendous loss," said Tribeca resident Iris Kimberg, who has played at Wall Street for 25 years. "I can’t drive to Queens every time I want to play." Susan Hall, a Battery Park City resident, and Alma Montclair, who works on Broad Street, play at the club two or three evenings a week, often together. Both participate in United States Tennis Association leagues, which schedule hundreds of matches and practices every year on Wall Street’s eight courts. "I’m very attached to the place," said Hall. "It’s very sad." The Stuyvesant High School tennis team has also practiced there for years. Martha Singer, Stuyvesant’s assistant principal for health and physical education, said the club’s closing will hurt the school’s program. "There’s no other place locally where one can play indoors," she said. Supporters of the tennis club planned to rally on the steps of City Hall at noon on July 10. And CB1 and Assemblyman Sheldon Silver wrote to Andrew Alper, president of the city’s Economic Development Corp. (EDC), asking him to let the club stay. But Alper was quoted in a May Daily News article saying that the piers were "in imminent danger of collapse." The club’s owners charge that the comment scared people unnecessarily and devastated their business. "If he really believed that the piers might collapse tomorrow, we’d be out of there already and it would be barricaded," said club manager Mark Kraus. According to the owners, the city has had a sudden change of heart. They say that the EDC, after deciding in May to close the club, supported the owners’ proposal to raise the funds to fix the piers. "They led us to believe that if we raised the money, we could do it," said Michael Del Prete, one of the owners. EDC spokeswoman Janel Patterson said closing the club was "strictly a public safety issue." Repairs could not be done in a "timely manner to insure the continued safe use of the piers," she said, and a five-year lease would require a lengthy review by the city. The owners and some CB1 members believe the city’s real goal is to clear the piers for the Guggenheim Museum, which hopes to build a Downtown branch on a swath of waterfront that includes Piers 13 and 14. But the Guggenheim must revise its design, raise hundreds of million of dollars, complete an environmental assessment and go through a public approval process before proceeding. Most observers say it will be years before construction begins, if it happens at all. "I don’t mind leaving if something is coming in," said Kraus, "but I don’t want to leave if it will remain empty,"