For the next eight decades, the utilitarian barn on the banks of the Charles River was one of the centers of American figure skating, training Button and fellow Olympic champion Tenley Albright, Olympic medalists Nancy Kerrigan and Paul Wylie and scores of U.S. champions.

The club has been the standard-bearer for American figure skating for more than a century. On Thursday, it became the epicenter of tragedy.

A Boston-area skating club reportedly lost two skaters, their mothers, and two coaches in the mid-air plane collision in Washington, D.C.

Jinna Han and Spencer Lane, two skaters training at the Norwood club, and their mothers were killed. Two coaches at the facility were also among the victims.

Passengers aboard the American Airlines flight that collided with an Army helicopter and crashed into the Potomac River included athletes returning from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships and their

The Skating Club of Boston, which lost six community members in the D.C. plane crash, suffered a similar tragedy in 1961.