Topic: Sports
Sports, sporting events, athletes
From 1956-1969, Bill Russell won eleven championships in thirteen seasons with the Boston Celtics, playing at the Boston Garden in the historic West End. Russell’s activism on and off the court advanced social justice and made him a role model for many athletes today.
Senda Berenson, the “Mother of Women’s Basketball” in the United States, grew up in the West End after her Lithuanian family moved to the neighborhood in 1875.
Harry “Buddo” Greenberg, a long-time West End resident, was an experienced basketball referee who liked to call a fast-paced game. The way he called games helped shape the direction of what became the NBA.
One of the West End’s most prominent settlement houses, the EPH served as a community center, education space, and more for more than half a century in the West End, and continues its work today in Somerville.
Boston stockbroker Thomas W. Lawson owned a racehorse, Boralma, who won $5000 in Kentucky’s Transylvania Stakes in 1900. The earnings were donated to the West End Nursery and Infants’ Hospital, with an amusing letter exchange between “Boralma” and “The Babies.”
Pedestrianism, or competitive walking, was a nationally popular sport in the 1870s and 1880s. The old West End was captivated by local competitions and news of world record-breaking pedestrians such as Boston’s Frank Hart, the most successful African-American pedestrian in the 1880s.
Annie Londonderry was a Latvian Jewish immigrant who became the first woman to bike around the world, and the first internationally recognized female athletic star.
Kittie Knox was a mixed-race cyclist who used her skills as a seamstress and cyclist to challenge gender and racial perceptions taking over the League of American Wheelman in the 1890’s.
