On October 24, 2009, 17 teams of two students each set out to solve a series of clues that would lead them to a secre location somewhere in Boston. Their mission was to then, take a photo of each location and race back to the Core office. Prizes: First place, $200 in Barnes and Noble gift certificates; second place, $100; third place, $50 to be split equally between the team members. Participation prize was the book: “Boston's Secret Spaces” for everyone who completed the race.

The winners of this first-ever Core Amazing Race were Katie Murray and Lester Black of Team Petrarch (pictured at right with Prof. Hamill, Prof. Wylie, and Prof. Eckel).

Congratulations to all finishing teams!

Finishing teams and time to complete:

1. Team PETRARCH, Katie Murray and Lester Black: 2 hours 33 minutes!
2. Team MACHIAVELL, Camille Dupaquier and Julia Macklin: 3 hours 25 minutes
3. Team ENKIDU, Mark Jahnke and Emily Keller: 3 hours 55 minutes
4. Team TELEMACHOS, Richard Dana and Matt Richter: 4 hours 20 minutes
5. Team ATHENA, Nicole Patzelt and Danielle Haslam: 4 hours 42 minutes
6. Team KALYPSO, Michelle Chan and Kate Pancarician: 4 hours 50 minutes
7. Team PENELOPE, Michelle Kwok and Adrianny Mendez: 5 hours 25 minutes
8. Team NINSUN, Emily Levin and Harleen Grewal: 5 hours 33 minutes
9. Team ARGOS, Jennifer Kole and Sarah Khalifa: 5 hours33 minutes
10. Team ISHTAR, Alison Weltman and Jennifer Zimmerman: 5 hours 39 minutes
11. Team SOCRATES, Caitlin Lesczynski and Andrew Smith: 5 hours57 minutes

How would you have done? See if you can answer
This Year's Clues:

1. He wrote Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1942, although it was not produced until three years after he died here in 1953.
2. This great Boston building is “Dedicated to the advancement of learning” and always remains “free to all”. Two lions live inside.
3. Can you believe that these famous religious murals were completed by the same artist who painted Madame X.
4. This author of The Prophet wrote “You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy.” He is memorialized here.
5. It is no surprise that after writing her most famous book, Harriet Beecher Stowe was a frequent guest at this house in Boston.
6. When this author became wealthy from the sales of her novel about Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, where did she reside in Boston?
7. A mother and her eight offspring were protagonists in a book which won the Caldecott Medal in 1942. Where are they immortalized in bronze?
8. This author of "The Fall of the House of Usher" and other macabre tales of the early nineteenth century was born in what old Boston neighborhood? A plaque stands here.
9. When Robert Lowell wrote “For the Union Dead,” he had this statue of Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th regiment in mind.
10. This corner shop was a gathering place for authors such as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Stowe, Dickens, and Holmes and it is mentioned in Matthew Pearl’s novel The Dante Club.
11. He had the biggest signature on the Declaration of Independence, now he rests here.
12. He was the first American to translate Dante’s Divine Comedy. A monument connecting Boston and Cambridge bears his name. What is it?
13. On this street lived both a Master of French Cooking and a lower-case poet.
14. Bob Donlin, one of Jack Kerouac’s “dharma bums,” founded this club in 1969. (pic 2)
15. Find the start of Psalm 8.4 engraved in stone to locate the place named for this friend of Henry David Thoreau.

Photos courtesy Team Ishtar.