Colossal Undertaking Left an Enduring Landmark

From the city core to the distant suburbs, the hulking concrete-and-steel structure of Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum is an immense jewel box of shared recollections -- touchdowns, home runs, presidential speeches and two Olympics.

It’s the place where Jesse Owens came to run, Jack Dempsey to fight, Sonja Henie to skate, Nelson Mandela and JFK to speak, Sandy Koufax to pitch, Pope John Paul II to preach and the Rolling Stones to rock.

The folks who made all that history and glory possible constituted a group of civic-minded Angelenos who transformed the Coliseum site from an urban eyesore notable only for racing, sex and cold beers into a living memorial to all U.S. war veterans.

What began as a 19th century fairgrounds soon became a rowdy, randy and dusty amusement zone. Agricultural Park had its complement of liquor, dog and horse races and, later, automobile speed competitions, as well as cheap hot-sheet hotels.

A young attorney who took a dim view of sin and corruption decided that Agricultural Park might be more aptly called Sodom and Gomorrah. One Sunday morning in 1898, William Miller Bowen was wondering about absenteeism at his Sunday school classes at University Methodist Church near USC, where he taught at the law school.

He spotted some of his truants and followed them to Agricultural Park, where they joined a crowd. Bowen, 37, pushed his way through the crowd and saw something that horrified him: greyhounds chasing terrified rabbits around a track, catching them and tearing them to pieces as delighted spectators cheered.

Bowen also spotted some of his law students drinking, gambling and visiting a “house of ill-fame.”

“It became clear in a very short time,” he complained to USC President George Bovard, “that the vicious influences here were more than undoing the work we were trying to do in our Sunday school class.... This is a plague spot, infecting the entire community, and if left alone it will bring us all into ill repute.”

Still seething with indignation days later, Bowen began a nearly three-decade campaign to reform the area.

First he organized the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Within two years, he saw to it that dog races were outlawed in Los Angeles.

Within another year, Bowen was elected to the City Council. Two years later he became its president and used his power to end gambling and horseracing at the park.

But Agricultural Park remained a speed haven for thrill-crazy Angelenos -- on four wheels, not four legs. In 1903, America’s most famous race driver of the era, Barney Oldfield, cigar clenched in his teeth, stormed his Winton Bullet around a mile-long dirt oval at the park in a world-record 55 seconds.

In 1906, two steam locomotives staged a head-on collision in a real demolition derby. Promoters had a mile of track laid for the event, and a crowd of 25,000 watched the engines huff and puff to 50 mph before they crashed into each other moments after the engineers leaped to safety.

Bowen embarked on a marathon lawsuit to reclaim the property from private owners, who held bits of the 160-acre site because state legislators had handed them out as political plums. He won the suit in 1908 and, with most of the land in public hands, went to work lobbying governmental agencies to spend the time and money to beautify and pacify the park.

By 1910, the saloons and brothels had been torn down and a trio of buildings had been planned: the National Guard armory, the Ahmanson Building as an exposition site (now California Science Center) and the Museum of Natural History. Later these three buildings would frame a seven-acre sunken rose garden.

In 1913, the area was dedicated as Exposition Park, with the breaking of a bottle of Owens River water from the new aqueduct.

The “Father of Exposition Park,” as Bowen became known, soon joined hands with USC President Bovard to propose a stadium for university football games and civic events.

They took their idea to a group of civic leaders, led by Harry Chandler of The Times and including publishers of four other local newspapers. The publishers formed the California Fiesta Assn., forerunner of a city agency called the Community Development Department, with real estate magnate William May Garland as president. To get the project off the ground, Chandler tapped each publisher and several well-heeled friends for $1,000.

Bowen approached architect John Parkinson, who with his son, Donald, would design such landmarks as Union Station and Bullocks Wilshire and, with two other architects, City Hall. Parkinson offered his firm’s services at cost, with the usual architect’s fee donated as “a citizen’s contribution.”

In 1920, Garland headed for Europe, a set of Coliseum blueprints in hand, to persuade the International Olympic Committee to hold the 1924 Olympics in L.A. He failed -- and, before sailing home, learned that voters had defeated the bond measure that would have paid for construction. Without a Coliseum, there was no hope of winning the 1932 Olympics.

But Garland refused to give up, and Parkinson continued to design. Chandler, impressed by the promoters’ determination, persuaded 14 bankers to underwrite construction with an $800,000 loan.

In 1922, Garland was elected to the IOC. And in 1923, the Coliseum officially opened as Olympic Stadium, with enough miles of benches to seat 76,000 people -- 13% of the city’s population. Soon, it would become the stage that the Southland needed to become the track and field capital of the world.

In the fall of 1923, USC’s football game against Pomona College dug the first divots in the new field. And in 1924, Garland achieved his goal: The 1932 Games were awarded to Los Angeles. The force and persuasiveness of Garland’s personality and salesmanship were reflected in the comment of a fellow IOC member: “Billy, I voted for Los Angeles because I like you personally. But where is Los Angeles? Is it anywhere near Hollywood?” Global conditions would conspire against those Games: The world’s economy was bottoming out, turning the Olympics into a luxury many nations could not afford. To cut costs, organizers built a 250-acre Olympic Village atop Baldwin Hills. That was for male athletes; female athletes were housed at a Wilshire Boulevard hotel.

For the bargain price of $2 a day per athlete for room and board, 37 nations sent 1,408 athletes -- down from the 46 countries and 3,014 competitors who had participated in 1928, but still a thrill for the city. To pay for their travel, Brazilian athletes had to hitch a ride on a coffee ship, then promote the product in the United States.

After the flame of the 10th Olympiad was extinguished, the stadium’s name was changed, but the stamp of the era remains with Olympic Auditorium and three street names: Olympiad Drive, Athenian Way and Olympic Boulevard.

It would be 52 years before the Games would return to Los Angeles.

Coliseum memories reach far beyond sports. In 1927, after his historic transatlantic solo flight, Col. Charles A. Lindbergh stood before the throngs and urged the city to build an airport.

In the waning days of World War II, 105,000 people filed in to welcome Gen. George S. Patton Jr. and Lt. Gen. James H. Doolittle. Searchlights sent 42 pillars of light into the sky to illuminate passing warplanes. Inside, land mines were detonated and tanks rolled through the noise and darkness to simulate Patton’s 3rd Army thrust toward Berlin.

The attendance record is held by the 1963 Billy Graham Crusade, for which 134,234 people packed in.

Today, the Coliseum is a national and state historic landmark and the world’s only stadium to have hosted a Super Bowl, a World Series and two Olympics.