Boston, MA
‘It still doesn’t feel real’: At the Skating Club of Boston, grief looms over the daily training grind – The Boston Globe
Weeks after the tragedy, the club is weathering waves of anguish all the while doing what has made it a standard-bearer for figure skating in America for more than a century. There is palpable grief, to be sure, but also the ever present grind of athletes striving for greatness.
“We keep them in our hearts while we do it, and it feels like we’re still skating together,” said LoPinto’s son, 16-year-old Zachary, who is the top-ranked male figure skater in New England, and fourth nationally, for his age group.
Han was returning from Wichita, Kan., where her 13-year-old daughter, Jinna, who was also killed in the crash, had attended a development camp following the US Figure Skating Championships. Han and her daughter never made it back to New England. Neither did youth skater Spencer Lane, his mother Christine Lane, and Evegenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, both former elite figure skaters who coached at the club.
The LoPintos often traveled with the Hans, and Donna LoPinto considered the possibility of members of her family being on that flight “a little” haunting.
The two families became tight because they were at this Norwood rink six days a week for their children.
Indeed, the club’s three-rink facility, on a slice of land wedged between Interstate 95 and Route 1, anchored much of the existences of the six victims. Take Han for instance. LoPinto, who considers the Hans to be family rather than friends, said of Jin, “Pretty much the rink was her life.”
Zachary and Jinna shared aspirations of becoming truly elite in their sport.
For the LoPintos, that meant moving from Long Island to Canton to give Zachary the best chance at success. He has trained at the Skating Club of Boston for the last four years. LoPinto’s husband still lives part time in New York, where he owns an insurance agency. Zachary’s commitment to the sport means he attends school online. Jinna, whom Zachary considered to be a little sister, had a similar academic arrangement.
Zachary’s six-day-a-week training regimen is vigorous. Many days he has three 80-minute sessions on the ice, in addition to off-ice jumping, the weight room, and physical therapy. Consistency, he said, is chief among his challenges. Some days, he feels fantastic about his jumps; others, he feels as though nothing is working. And the higher the jumps, the more inconsistent the results, he said. This is his life.
“I feel free on the ice,” he said.
Out on the ice during a recent weekday afternoon, a handful of skaters worked on their craft. This specific rink, named after Tenley E. Albright, a Newton native who became the first American female skater to win an Olympic gold medal, in 1956, has a capacity for 2,500 spectators and is designated for the highest performing skaters.
To the uninitiated, it all looks effortless at first as the skaters glide in elegant arcs, punctuated by spins or jumps. Then occasionally someone lands awkwardly and ends up on their backside. And the truth becomes real: This can be taxing work.
Locally, figure skating is a tight-knit community. The Norwood club has about 1,200 members, about 60 percent of whom are “active skaters,” a spokesperson said. It’s one of only three facilities in the nation owned and operated by a figure skating club. The facility opened in 2020, following decades at a rink on Soldiers Field Road.
Covering one wall on the side of the rink is a massive timeline chronicling the club’s rich history. Its narrative is intertwined with the development of figure skating in the US. The club was founded in 1912. By 1963, it had produced eight female figure skating national champions.
The display also covers past heartbreak. A 1961 plane crash in Belgium killed the entire US skating team, including 10 members of the Boston club, who were on their way to the world championships.
The last photo in the timeline shows the smiling Shishkova and Naumov, the two coaches who died in the D.C. plane crash. They are flanking their son, Maxim Naumov, who was competing at the US Championships in Kansas but traveled home Sunday before his parents.
Becky Stump, the club’s coaching director, choked up when talking about that family and the club’s culture. Shishkova, she said, was “an absolute sweetheart,” while Naumov “really cared about his skaters, not just as skaters but as people, which is not always the case with coaches”
Originally from Russia, Shishkova and Naumov won the pairs title at the 1994 world championships and competed twice in the Olympics. They were also “good people,” Stump said.
She recalled she wanted to ask Shishkova about where she got her hair done because “her hair always looked so good.” But coaches at the club are perpetually busy, and she missed her chance.
Stump texted Naumov while he was in Wichita, saying she hoped his son, Maxim, would skate well at the US Championships, and included a prayer hands emoji. After Maxim finished fourth, Naumov messaged her: ”God heard your prayers, Becky.”
“Now, I’m reading it and I’m like ‘Oh God,’” she said.
Maxim has not trained since the crash that took his parents’ lives, Stump said, but he has taught some lessons at the club.
Elite figure skaters, she said, can be adept at compartmentalization.
“Skaters learn to be in the moment when you have to be in the moment and when you’re not that’s when you have your space to cry, but it’s been really tough,” she said, especially since many are still in their competitive season. She pointed out Jinna Han’s coach out on the ice. She is coaching a pairs team that is bound for the World Championships next month at Boston’s TD Garden.
And while the sport often forces its athletes to learn how to deal with deep disappointment, there is still pervasive anxiety attached to the recent catastrophe. Stump mentioned a trip that some of the club’s members will take to Colorado Springs for an upcoming competition.
“They’re all scared,” she said, referencing the impending plane ride. “Parents, skaters, everybody.”
In a hallway near the rink is an informal tribute to Spencer Lane and Jinna Han. The memorial, located where the two used to lace up their skates before stepping out onto the ice, includes teddy bears, flowers, cards, a hand drawing, candy, and framed photos of each skater.
The club expects to have a handful of its members in the mix to qualify for the next Winter Olympics. The organization also thinks multiple Olympic cycles ahead. One pre-teen on the ice, the club spokesperson said, is a prospect for the 2034 Winter Olympics in Milan.
Zachary LoPinto’s long-term goal is to qualify for the Olympics at least once, maybe twice. More immediately, there is the pain of loss.
His mother recalled Jin Han as selfless. “If you wanted to sit, she’d give you her chair. If you wanted food, she’d give you her food first before she would feed herself,” she said
Han’s husband, Joon, still comes to the rink for a hug, a coffee, or a chat. He pushes Zachary, who considers him an uncle, to excel, said Donna LoPinto.
“Some days,” she said, “are harder than others.”
Danny McDonald can be reached at daniel.mcdonald@globe.com. Follow him @Danny__McDonald.
But the story of the Poor Clares’ monastery — or as it’s known on the books of the Boston Planning Department, 920 Centre Street — is, at least for now, a case study on how housing doesn’t get built in this city.
It’s a story about how one midsized project with everything going for it — a world-class architect, a brilliant landscape designer, and a developer willing to make one compromise after another to the size and layout of the plan — still can’t move the needle in the face of one powerful opponent.
Well, make that one powerful opponent who has the ear of City Hall.
Faced with dwindling numbers in their order (they were down to 10 in 2022) and a Vatican mandate to consolidate, the sisters decided to sell their 2.8-acre parcel and the aging monastery building to developer John Holland. The building, which they had occupied since 1934, was expensive to heat and in need of extensive repairs.
They relocated to Westwood in 2023, hoping to expand those quarters to accommodate another 10 nuns from around the country as soon as the sale of the Jamaica Plain property became final, contingent on the approval of its redevelopment.
They’re still waiting.
The former monastery is neighbor to the Arnold Arboretum, land owned by the city but under a renewable 1,000-year lease to Harvard University. And no question, the 281-acre parcel is a tree-filled treasure for researchers and picnickers alike. Just try getting near the place on Lilac Sunday.
But the Arboretum, or rather its director, William Friedman, a Harvard evolutionary biology professor, has emerged as a powerful foe.
“The development has been part of the city’s planning process for nearly five years and has undergone several revisions,” Sr. Mary Veronica McGuff, the order’s abbess, wrote in a letter to Mayor Michelle Wu in January and shared with the editorial board. “We are very disappointed to learn that the main obstacle is … the Arnold Arboretum.”
She revealed that the order had earlier offered to sell the property to the Arboretum, but was rebuffed.
“It’s upsetting that our progress is now being hindered by an institution that declined the opportunity to take stewardship of the land and is now making unreasonable demands for its redevelopment,” she said in the letter.
In fact, its market rate condo component, once slated to be five stories high, has been reduced to four stories. Those 38 senior rental units planned for the monastery building will include 25 affordable units.
Project architect David Hacin, winner of the Boston Preservation Alliance’s 2022 President’s Award for Excellence, is equally bewildered.
“I don’t understand how a project that is so good on so many levels is being held up for years, literally, over asks that seem, to me, completely unreasonable,” Hacin told Globe business reporter Catherine Carlock. “If we can’t build five-story buildings, how are we going to solve the housing crisis?”
How indeed.
The developers have done shadow studies, a sunlight analysis, and tree root studies to convince Arboretum officials that the planned housing would do no damage to the magnolia tree roots on the perimeter of Harvard’s grounds, which seem to be their main bone of contention.
The project’s landscape architect Mikyoung Kim has surely not acquired her international reputation for “ecological restoration” by murdering magnolia trees.
Friedman has met with Boston’s planning chief, Kairos Shen, but as of Thursday the sisters have not yet been granted a similar opportunity. Nor have they heard from either Wu or Shen (who was copied in on the Jan. 12 letter) since they made their appeal for help “in finding a solution that allows this project to move forward and for our community to finally settle into our new home.”
In a statement to the Globe editorial board, Wu said, “Large properties like 920 Centre Street are significant housing sites for Boston, and we are working actively with all parties to advance a plan that would deliver homes our city needs.”
For the past year, experts have been warning that the slumping number of building permits in Greater Boston — down 44 percent last year from four years ago — do not bode well for an increase in the future housing supply. That dearth in supply is driving up prices and rents.
And while the Wu administration is quick to blame President Trump’s tariffs and rising costs for the construction slump, it fails to look in the mirror. Enabling the kind of Not In My Back Yard obstructionism that is keeping a good project on the drawing boards for years will never get Boston the kind of housing it needs to keep pace with demand and allow this city to thrive.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.
“In moments of challenge and in moments of conflict, it does feel easier to put your head down,” Wu said at an event at the Old State House commemorating Attucks.
“Remembering the full history pushes us to be the beacon of freedom that the rest of the country and the rest of the world so very much needs.”
Inside the Old State House’s council chambers, city leaders, historians, and students gathered to celebrate Attucks’ legacy. They talked about the importance of memorializing him during a time when many present said the contributions of people of color to American history were being erased by the Trump administration, and the country’s founding principles were under attack.
Senator Lydia Edwards said the death of Attucks and the four others killed during the Boston Massacre helped establish important legal principles that still guide the country today.
Following the killings, British soldiers involved in the incident were put on trial. John Adams, who later became president, agreed to defend them in court, arguing that the rule of law must be upheld even during times of intense conflict.
“Even in these moments of strife, oppression of rogue federal government, that we remember that we stood up and still held to our court system, to the rule of law and to due process,” Edwards said. “We also remember who had to die in order to remind ourselves to do that.”
City Councilor Brian Worrell said Attucks was a symbol of the long struggle for equality in the country.
“It’s a story that is a reminder that Black and Indigenous Americans have always been at the forefront [of] the fight for justice,” Worrell said.
He said when he recounts Boston’s Black history, he almost always starts with Attucks’ story.
“He fought not simply against the tea tax or the Stamp Act, he fought for the most basic of rights. He fought for equal human lives. It’s a fight we as a city are still having,” he said.
Wu spoke about how on March 5, 2025, she was called to testify before Congress about Boston’s immigration policies during a six-hour hearing. She touted Boston’s safety record amid aggressive questioning, arguing that the city’s immigration policies improved public safety.
“On the 255th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, on Crispus Attucks Day, there was no way that this city wasn’t going to be represented in standing up for what’s right,” Wu said.
A chandelier lit the council chamber and red curtains covered its historic windows. On both sides of the room, students sat with their teachers. Winners of the Crispus Attucks Essay Contest, which invites local students to explore Attucks’ legacy, sat next to the podium.
“Sometimes history repeats itself,” said Toni Martin, an attendee at the event, who came to support her niece, who was being awarded. “Sometimes it gets better, but it takes revolutionary people to make change perfect.”
Outside of the State House after the commemoration, Sharahn Pullum, 18, who came in second for the essay contest, said, “My inspiration was just getting the opportunity to speak on something that matters.”
Michael Kelly, 65, joined the wreath-laying ceremony that took place at the Boston Massacre Commemorative Plaza. Kelly held a sign that said, “Ice Out Be Goode,” referring to Renee Good, a US citizen who was shot and killed by immigration agents in Minneapolis earlier this year.
Kelly said he had been standing at the plaza for three hours and is planning to stand there the entire day.
“People can stretch their imaginations to understand that this place, what happened here, is not at all different than what happened in Minneapolis,” Kelly said with tears in his eyes. “People standing up for something they believe in is vastly important, and we can’t be daunted.”
Aayushi Datta can be reached at aayushi.datta@globe.com.
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Born and raised in Southie, Heather Foley has seen her neighborhood morph over the past three decades of scrubbing, renovation, and new construction for higher-income new arrivals.
But even Foley was surprised to discover that her South Boston, where kids once went to the corner to buy milk and cigarettes for parents, has emerged with the city’s second-highest average income, even ahead of Charlestown and Beacon Hill.
Her first thought?: “I gotta start being nicer to my neighbors if that’s the kind of money they’re making.”
What’s a household?
Decades ago, when “Good Will Hunting” was filmed in the neighborhood and Southie was known as a working-class area, there were more kids around and maybe just a single breadwinner in some homes.
Since then, Southie saw more two-earner households, fewer kids, and spiffier rental units where three or four roommates could contribute to a “household.” The changes, along with spillover from the adjacent, pricier Seaport, or South Boston waterfront, are factors in Census data showing more than 40 percent of Southie households earn more than $200,000 a year.
Staying put
Foley, 46, a photo shoot producer, considers herself lucky. She didn’t move out to the South Shore like many neighborhood longtimers. She’s living in a family home on a block with residents — oldtimers and newer arrivals — who aren’t flipping properties for big bucks.
Another blessing, particularly valuable this winter? She has a driveway.
As a kid, she went to church and school at Gate of Heaven, St. Brigid, and St. Peter, and jokes that she’s “so sad I didn’t buy a three-decker with my First Communion money, because I probably could have.”
Waves of gentrification
She remembers the earlier waves of newcomers, when glassy sports bars like Stats Bar & Grille muscled in among longtime restaurants like Amrheins.
But now, even the popular Stats is moving out at the end of the month. The property owner is developing a five-story, mixed-use residential building at the site.
A small silver lining
Foley notes that some of the onetime “newcomers” have been here for three decades — and in some ways, have stabilized the place. Many have raised kids, who, like her son, may return to the neighborhood as young adults (albeit splitting a rented apartment with friends). Stats, the sports bar, says it will also return to the neighborhood’s thriving food scene.
“We have a lot of great restaurants now,” Foley says, “and everyone cleans up after their dog.”
Read: These maps show Boston’s wealthiest and most populous neighborhoods — plus other key trends.
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Patriots, strippers, and hookahs: A downtown restaurant’s liquor license is in jeopardy after it allegedly hosted Patriots players and guests after their AFC Championship in January. A decision is expected today.
‘Culture of secrecy’: In a scathing report, R.I. authorities accused the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence of decades of “inaction, concealment, and revictimization” in complaints of clergy sexual abuse of hundreds of children.
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♯ Teenage dreams: The future rock stars were teenagers when they wrote songs, influenced by David Bowie and Stevie Wonder, about a fictional nightclub. A half-century later, Squeeze has reworked and is releasing those songs.
💻 Death by chatbot? A new lawsuit alleges Google’s chatbot sent a man on missions to find an android body it could inhabit. When that failed, it set a suicide countdown clock for him. (WSJ)
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Thanks for reading Starting Point.
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