Los Angeles’ First Olympics Changed It Forever

What sort of city did spectators, athletes and journalists see when they arrived in Los Angeles in the summer of 1932? It was, to be sure, not the same shambling village that had bid for and won the Olympics nine years before. LA’s population had doubled, to 1,470,516, during the decade. The dusty pueblo had burgeoned into a world center for moviemaking, oil drilling, and citrus production. No fewer than six daily newspapers covered the region, all now boisterously heralding the Olympic Games. Olympic athletes still saw plenty of open space—there were no freeways—but downtown Los Angeles looked like a bustling metropolis, jammed with noisy automobiles, streetcars and pedestrians. The city’s movie stars, including Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, lived mainly on the elevated slopes of Hollywood and Beverly Hills. The corner of Sunset and Vine was a magnet for tourists, who could dine at the nearby Brown Derby while scouting the room for celebrities. LA’s civic center boasted a lustrous new thirty-two-floor city hall, designed in part by John Parkinson, architect of the Coliseum. In Pershing Square, careworn vagabonds listened as roving evangelists shared their visions. West from there on Wilshire Boulevard, at the east end of the newly… Read full this story

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