Berston Field House: the Flint gym that made an Olympic champion

An eleven-year-old girl walked into a brick recreation center on Flint’s north end and started hitting a heavy bag. About a decade later Claressa Shields was standing on an Olympic podium in London — the first American woman ever to win boxing gold — and then she did it again in Rio. The gym where she learned to throw a punch is Berston Field House, and Shields is only the most famous name on a long list of fighters and ballplayers it has turned out.

Berston opened in 1923 on land the Neil J. Berston family deeded to the city, designed by the planning firm of John Nolen. Inside were an auditorium, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, meeting rooms, and a branch library — a whole neighborhood under one roof. In the mid-1930s it became the first recreation center in Flint to open its doors to the Black families living around it, which made the place more than a gym. For generations on the north end it was the center that didn’t turn you away.

The city eventually pulled back its funding, and Berston could have gone the way of Flint’s other shuttered community houses. It didn’t. A nonprofit took it over and kept the youth programs running through the city’s hardest decades, and a state historical marker went up in 1994 to mark what the building had meant. A century after it opened, Berston is still standing on the same corner, still letting kids in the door — the kind of place that quietly raises a champion and then gets back to raising everybody else.