Website Page: Monument recognizing basketball birthplace in Mason Square Springfield helped by lifelong city resident Aaron Williams (July 18, 2010)
Description:
This is a website page on Masslive.com containing an article titled, "Monument recognizing basketball birthplace in Mason Square Springfield helped by lifelong city resident Aaron Williams". The article was written by Ron Chimelis and published in the Springfield Republican on July 18, 2010. The website page was accessed and the pages printed out on June 3, 2013. The article talks about the monument celebrating the creation of basketball on Mason Square. Aaron Williams was the driving force in the creation of the monument. There is history of the site and the creation of basketball within. There are 9 pages from the website. Comments made by readers make up the last pages. The building has been known by many different names over the years including the Winchester Square Building, the Mason Square building and the Armory Hill building. Construction on the building was completed in the spring of 1886 and it was dedicated on June 1 of that year. The building consisted of a reading room, gymnasium, parlor, a recitation room, an amusement room and fifty sleeping rooms. The Armory Hill YMCA also rented rooms in the building. In 1891 James Naismith, while a faculty member at the school, invented the game of basketball in the gymnasium of the building. In 1890 the School for Christian Workers separated into two schools which continued to operate out of the same building, the YMCA Training School and the School for Christian Workers. In 1896 the Training School, now Springfield College, finished the transition to its new location on Alden Street and in 1897 the School for Christian Workers became the Bible Normal College and moved to Hartford, Connecticut. The original building was torn down in 1965 to create a parking lot. In 1995, McDonald’s Corporation bought the land, excavating the original foundation and bricks before building a restaurant on the site. Today, there is a monument commemorating the site as the birthplace of basketball.
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Publisher:
masslive.com; Springfield Republican (Springfield, Mass.)
