Every August since 1978, a city within a city has popped up in Flushing Meadows, Queens. In just a few weeks, the corner of an almost 900-acre public park is transformed into the United States Open, along with its six fully staffed restaurants and 60 concessions stands, 20 stocked and staffed stores, five active loading docks, dozens of artfully landscaped tennis courts and strolling areas, a police force the size of a small Montana town, and three stadiums filled with passionate tennis fans, some of whom will probably soon be dancing the “Whip/Nae Nae” for the “spider cam” at Arthur Ashe Stadium. All of this hustle and bustle will help to bring in an estimated $700 million-plus for the New York area.  “It is now a full-blown entertainment extravaganza,” said Justin Gimelstob, a Tennis Channel commentator and the coach for the American player John Isner. “The event captivates the most eclectic city in the world for two weeks.”  The logistics involved in putting together the Open, which employs more than 7,000 people and welcomes around 700,000 fans every year, seem daunting enough without starting from a place of rubble and cranes. But that was the case this year. Because of the construction of Ashe Stadium’s new retractable steel roof, the dramatic tension involved was understandably elevated.  Come Monday, once the qualifying rounds have concluded and the tournament has officially begun, the village will be bursting with sponsor activities, long food lines and glamorous watering holes, an astonishing transformation from just over three weeks ago.  Destruction and desolation reign outside Ashe, but inside the stadium, a honeycomb of offices is abuzz with activity.  When the 7 train approached the Mets-Willets Point stop, winding its way through the treetops before offering a glimpse of Ashe Stadium, it looked as though a giant white U.F.O. had glommed onto the top of the complex. That would be the roof, all 6,500 tons of it, which is scheduled to be operational for the 2016 Open.  Because of the $150 million roof project, the area around the stadium was a construction zone until mid-August, delaying tournament preparations. “Setup has been anything but ordinary,” said Daniel Zausner, chief operating officer of the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.  In early August, the grounds looked apocalyptic, as if everyone had just given up and gone home. There were unopened crates from the tournament’s 21 official sponsors, potted flowers yet to be planted, lonely, unmanned forklifts and piles of debris. The few individuals spotted seemed hard at work, though, including Dashaughn Miller, who had been hired to put together a new look for a cafe in the food village at the behest of a new promotional partner, Lavazza, an Italian company that is providing the “official coffee” for the Open.  Mr. Miller was working near what would be the main entrance, which was filled with rubble and uprooted trees. The area had been torn up in order to provide a landing pad for the tallest crane in the country — shipped from Germany in December. The fountain in front of Ashe, surrounded by large piles of sand, was dry and cracked.  On the far west side of the stadium, the five practice courts for the main-draw players were being rebuilt, having been demolished by a second crane. Now a grounds team had about two weeks to finish reconstructing and resurfacing them, which is a time-consuming process.  “We had to give the construction group a drop-dead date of when we needed the area turned back over to us,” said Ryan Ferrera, the senior manager of courts and grounds of the tennis center. The crane left a month ago, to allow Mr. Ferrera’s crew to remove the rubble and put down new asphalt, which needed to cure for 30 days. About 10 coats of DecoTurf, a “rubber and sand” combo, he said, was being applied to the courts. All 33 courts reserved for the tournament receive about three new coats of DecoTurf every year, Mr. Ferrera said. “Most courts don’t go through as much engineering as these,” he said. “There’s a challenge with the footprint here; there’s a lot of movement, we’re surrounded by water.”  The tennis center is also surrounded by a security presence, put in place by Michael J. Rodriguez, a former detective sergeant in the New York Police Department and supervisor for the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Mr. Rodriguez, who worked through the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa and Sept. 11, “retired” in 2003 to work as the director of security for the U.S. Open and security adviser for the United States Tennis Association.  A ring of private offices and hallways at the court level of Ashe thrummed with executive purpose, but Mr. Rodriguez’s command center was to be the hub of it all. Inside, there were rows of desks outfitted with large monitors for 18 people integral to the event, including members of the Police and Fire Departments, security operations managers, medical providers and deputy referees.  Two women were seated in the back of the command center. They were security coordinators in charge of putting into effect Mr. Rodriguez’s strict and complicated deliveries system. “We had last year 1,842 truck deliveries in a two-week period,” he said. “So we have created internally one of the best truck inspection systems in the country.”  Vendors must fill out a form detailing their trucks and drivers, who are then vetted, approved and given a bar code and specific directions to an inspection point outside the tennis center. “There’s only one way,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “Anyone who tries to come off a different highway to make a delivery, the police, who are stationed all around our perimeter, will never let them through.”  The retail merchandise portion of these deliveries ends up at a warehouse behind the indoor tennis center. It is run by FMI, the merchandise concessionaire for the Open. On Aug. 7 — a few days after the warehouse opened for the season — it was mostly empty, with only about 100 boxes toward the back and a half-dozen workers, looking exhausted yet content. The work, they knew all too well, was just beginning.  A look at the money, the history and the snacks that make up the United States Open.  “See all the booths on the grounds we have to put merchandise in? We have to clean them all, we have to count every piece, everything that’s in these boxes has to be counted,” said Jeff Hilty, a manager for FMI.  Mr. Hilty brought in some trusted employees to help get the process started. Millie Cruz of Queens Village specializes in invoicing, and her quiet, confident demeanor was welcome in a chaotic warehouse. Her sons, Thomas, 18, and Daniel, 15, were also brought in to work for the season. Thomas, who is starting at Queens College and was back at the Open for his third year, and Daniel, a rising sophomore at Bayside High School who was here for the first time, were “doing whatever we’re told to do.”  The grounds of the tennis center have been rebuilt. This is the day for florists and landscapers, completing merchandising maps and receiving dry goods.  Things were noticeably coming together. Promotional banners with big fuzzy tennis balls were hung on every post along the wooden-planked bridge from the subway stop to the tennis center. Construction workers were putting together a baggage-check area, and inside the grounds, larger banners, featuring tennis champions, past and present, had gone up. (It takes eight people to install the banners, Mr. Zausner said.)  Inside Ashe Stadium, Ashley Devolder, 26, from nearby Astoria, painted a fresh coat of blue on a wall near the players’ entrance and media center. Before this task, she said, she had been part of a team of 20 who freshened up the 34,000 armrests on the stadium’s seats. “We had to sand them, clean them, and paint them,” she said. “It took a week.”  Outside Ashe, rubble was removed and replaced by either grass or smooth asphalt. Lights were strung at the patio of Mojito, one of the Open’s sit-down restaurants, and a new bar had been built around one of eight hard-to-miss bright blue bases that support the new roof structure (Mr. Zausner’s idea). The main plaza was cleaned up, trees were replanted and colorful flowers were in place at the entrance.  “We did the hanging baskets with wave petunia, and crotons and vinca,” said Kieran D’Arcy, a landscape designer with Garden World & Keil Brothers, a Flushing florist.  Mr. D’Arcy said that in late winter, floral requests were sent to three or four growers on Long Island. Just after July 4, he said, a half-dozen landscapers started working with the 15,000 or so individual plants that arrived at the tennis center.  The warehouse was now so full of boxes and workers that one could hardly navigate the place. Ms. Cruz and her sons were found in another area of the campus, setting up cash registers. When asked how his first job was going, Daniel, the 15-year-old, said: “At first it was a little hard and confusing, but now that I’m used to everything it’s pretty easy.”  The retail stores, which would sell all manner of U.S. Open-branded clothing and souvenirs, were beginning to receive merchandise. Mary Ryan, the director of merchandising and licensing for the U.S.T.A., stopped by the Octagon, a popular store and meeting point among fans. At the counter, naked mannequin torsos awaited 2015 Open shirts.  “Bring it on, let’s do this!” said Jeff Hilty, the FMI manager helping to oversee the warehouse. He was in the back of the store, surrounded by boxes and empty shelves, waiting on Ms. Ryan’s “merchandising map,” in which she details what goes where in each store.  And then there’s the food. “This event has become as much about the food and beverage experience as about just being here,” said Craig Appel, the senior regional director of operations for Levy Restaurants. Levy oversees all food and beverage at the Open, including restaurants and concessions, Mr. Appel said. The company, which is based in Chicago, flew in 250 Levy managers and chefs, he said, and hired locally for everything else: some 2,200 waiters, line cooks, cashiers and busboys.  Food deliveries were going on virtually round the clock at two loading docks, the main one at Ashe and a second behind the food village, Mr. Appel said. Underneath Ashe is what Mr. Zausner referred to as the stadium’s “city of refrigeration.” He pointed out a room where he said 12 butchers would work, and another where salads would be made in an assembly line.  It is the day before players start to arrive for the qualifying matches. The grounds, beginning to pop and sparkle, are full of credentialed workers installing sponsor exhibits, moving merchandise or undergoing job training.  In the players’ dining area, a 5,500-square-foot space with sweeping olive-color drapes and hardwood floors, where athletes and their entourages can have made-to-order pasta or quinoa bowls and sushi, a servers’ meeting was being held, and plastic packets of blue staff T-shirts were being distributed.  Maribel Tufino, 22, from Park Slope, Brooklyn, who has worked at Starbucks, was training to be a barista at the Lavazza coffee bar in the players’ lounge. She seemed unfazed when she was asked what she would do if Serena Williams asked her for a cappuccino. “I haven’t seen tennis too much,” she said. A Lavazza trainer instructed five others on breaking down and cleaning the espresso machines.  The lounge needed to be ready by the next morning, when about 200 players would arrive for qualifying rounds.  At the entrance to the players’ quarters, the blue wall painted by Ms. Devolder had dried, and technicians were working on lighting both the media room and the main gantlet walked by the tennis players to enter the court at Ashe Stadium. It was a tech dress rehearsal.  Outside, the grounds looked like a scene from a Richard Scarry picture book: Officials in polo shirts were riding around on golf carts; workers, elevated by scissor lifts, were polishing the structure that held the tenting over the food court; those merchandise crates were open, their contents being incorporated into interactive displays by teams of shirtless men; the once-dry fountain was spurting water; and forklifts were delivering goods to various stores and restaurants, in front of which sat stacks of boxes, waiting to be attended to. At Ashe’s loading dock, trucks were lined up to deliver products — tea, sugar, cups, ice machines, soda.  North of Ashe, ESPN’s new mobile headquarters had grown from a pile of cables, crates and trailers a few weeks ago to a polished two-story broadcast compound, with nine studios that would be staffed by more than 100 people. To Ashe’s south, in the food village, was a slightly botched wallpaper job on the exterior of the Lavazza cafe, most likely noticeable only to Mr. Miller, who was preparing to redo it. “The lines don’t match up,” he said. Daniel Cruz, the 15-year-old warehouse worker, walked by the cafe looking harried, but focused. “I’m delivering power strips to the Polo store,” he said.  Many other teenagers would soon be gathering for work between the Grandstand and Louis Armstrong stadiums. Tina Taps, manager of the U.S. Open ball people, emerged from the area clearly preoccupied with a new electronic scheduling system, not to mention training the 100 or so rookies who would be arriving in two days. But Ms. Taps, who has held this job for over 25 years, seemed confident. For one thing, her seasonal staff of approximately 275 includes a group of 20 or so veterans who mentor the new people, and they do not work these gigs for the money or the glory. “They’re doing it,” she said, “for the pure enjoyment of the event.”  Correction: August 28, 2015 An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Aug. 21. It was the day before players started to arrive for the qualifying matches. It was not the day before the qualifying matches.  A version of this article appears in print on August 30, 2015, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Just in Time, a City Rises in Queens . Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
A miniature metropolis quickly takes shape in Flushing Meadows every August. With a stadium under construction this year, “quickly