“If you build it, (t)he(y) will come.”
Organizers of the 1932 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles scrapped, sold and shipped hundreds of souvenir shelters to sports spectators while local families starved in unsanitary shacks and sheds.
Olympiad Los Angeles 1932
~Olympic Motto~
“The Important Thing In The Olympic Games Is Not To Win, But To Take Part;
The Important Thing In Life Is Not The Triumph, But The Struggle;
The Essential Thing Is Not To Have Conquered, But To Have Fought Well.
To Spread These Precepts Is To Build Up A Stronger And More Valiant And,
Above All, More Scrupulous And More Generous Humanity.”
—Baron PIERRE De COUBERTIN
Founder and Life Honorary President of the Olympic Games
At the most distressing depths of the Great Depression, Los Angeles built 600 homes for visiting Olympic athletes, while struggling L.A. residents’ makeshift dwellings got leveled, burned and raided by authorities.
“NY32” III Winter Olympics
Feb 2nd—14th, 1932
After a disappointing turnout of only twelve countries—including U.S.A. and Canada, followed next by Germany—showing up in Missouri for “St. Louis 1904”/the Games of the III Olympiad, and then problems drawing people to New York (where future President Franklin D. Roosevelt was Governor) for Lake Placid’s III Winter Games in February, 1932, the Olympic Organizing Committee desperately needed to attract athletes from far and wide to Los Angeles, California by the end of July.
In 1904, 1908 and 1912, Olympic gold medals were actually solid gold, a universally attractive prize, but the cost of medals went up in World War I, and Olympic medals’ compositions were changed to be more affordable. Today, gold medals have around six grams of gold.
17 total countries competed in “NY32”, with the most coming from Canada and Germany, just like it was in St. Louis 1904. Germany’s enthusiastic cooperation may be why FDR declined to join in the popular 1935 boycott of Adolf Hitler’s XI Olympiad, which had been rescheduled after Berlin’s VI Olympiad in 1916 was cancelled due to WWI. Canada and Germany were followed by (in order) Norway, Japan, Poland, Italy and Sweden.
Mexico
Mexico did not participate in St. Louis 1904 or NY32, but sent 73 athletes to LA32, winning two silver medals: one in shooting and one in boxing. In 1933, Mexico gave a Los Angeles vendor an unforgettable and iconic LA32 souvenir that is still standing on Olvera Street near Union Station. It’s a two-bedroom cottage—one of the last remaining out of around 600 identical abodes from the first-ever* Olympic Village.
The United States was carrying out “repatriation” of Mexican-Americans at this same time, a glaring Constitutional violation, then selling a fantastical version of American history about the original Missions, meant to draw vehicular tourism. From 1929 to 1939, hundreds of thousands or possibly over a million people were “deported” to Mexico, with around half of them being young Mexican-American citizens (the children of legal immigrants).
Six months before the 1932 “Summer Games” were to begin in Los Angeles, when the 1932 III Winter Games were about to be underway in Lake Placid, only a dozen countries had committed to sending athletes to “LA32”. They’d need at least triple or quadruple to have a decent event. The Games no longer offered huge lumps of solid gold as prizes — they only did that for eight years (1904-1912).
*France had somewhat of an IX Olympiad Olympic Village in 1928, but it wasn’t as planned or centrally located as LA32’s and was less of a media spectacle.
Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum
Located near USC in Expo Park, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was supposed to be dedicated to World War I veterans:
“The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was originally constructed between 1921 and 1923 as a tribute to local World War I veterans.”
But the real reason for constructing the stadium was because an impressive venue was a prerequisite for seriously bidding to host X Olympiad. Not that there were any other takers. No one else applied. Still, the 100,000-seat venue was erected and the bid for LA32 was officiated at an IOC meeting in Rome the same year the Coliseum was completed—1923.
Also in 1923, Pasadena’s Rose Bowl (capacity 52,250) was constructed for $325k (not including land). It would host Olympic events during LA32, as well, along with about 18 other venues in L.A.
Over the next 9 years, the stock market would crash and the entire world would fall into an economic recession. The financial catastrophe would allow fascism to take hold in Europe, setting in motion the events that would lead the U.S.A. to enter another World War.
Bonus Army
Widespread poverty and homelessness would be exasperated by a massive dust storm in the middle of the country, and World War I veterans would start losing their jobs and growing impatient about cashing in their pensions, which wasn’t supposed to be possible until 1945.
The veterans’ situation came to a head around May, when tens of thousands of veterans, along with their hungry families and supporters known as the Bonus Army descended on Washington D.C. and demanded their early pay ($1.25/day overseas or $1/day domestically).
The Bonus Army set up a protest encampment called Mark’s Camp in D.C. and a bill to pay them passed the House on 6/15 but failed in the Senate on 6/17. The protests continued and on July 28th, D.C. police shot and killed two WWI veterans, injured dozens more and the encampment was burned to the ground by the military and police.
Considering U.S.A. would enter and exit a second World War before the original WW1 bonuses matured, settling debts with the veterans who fought the first one would seem wise. But they’d be told “no” many times before that would happen, and two of them killed—shot dead by militarized D.C. police (and then buried at Arlington) in the battle for their own bonuses.
Neither President Hoover, nor future President FDR would be very receptive to the demands of the Bonus Army. Eventually, Congress was able to override FDR’s veto of the Adjusted Payment Compensation Act. In the end, the WWI veterans got their money nine years early, starting in 1936.
Unfazed and insulated, L.A.’s Olympic boosters kept planning for their extravagant show-and-tell. The only way it may have failed would have been if no one showed up.
1932
2/2-13 III Winter Games Lake Placid, New York
6/15 • Bonus Army WWI veterans demand early pay, House passes Bonus Bill
6/17 • 6,000 march in D.C. and set up a camp, Senate kills Bonus Bill
7/28 • D.C. cops kill 2 WWI vets, level/“sweep” protest encampment
7/30 • X Olympiad opening ceremony fills Los Angeles Memorial (for WWI veterans) Coliseum (which was built to host LA32*), President Hoover does not attend.
7/30-8/14 • Summer Games**, Olympic torch burns, Olympic Village operational
8/14 • LA32 closing ceremony, protest
11/8 • Voters elect NY Gov FDR as POTUS
*LA32 is shorthand for X Olympiad, which took place in Los Angeles, California in July-August 1932, and NY32 refers to III Winter Games, which took place in Lake Placid, New York in February 1932.
**In a way, it could be said that LA32 was the first “Summer Games” because U.S.A. hosted both winter and summer Olympics in 1932. There was a need to differentiate the two events because they were held only a few months apart. Although France and Switzerland had hosted I & II Winter Games and VIII & IX Olympiad events in 1924 & 1928, it doesn’t seem like they used the phrase “Summer Games” to distinguish between the two events in either country.
“LA32” X Olympiad
July 30th—Aug. 14th, 1932
Olympic Village in Baldwin Hills
The first-ever Olympic Village was:
a neoliberal Planning utopia.
on private land that was to be returned to Olympic Planner William May Garland in its original condition after the Summer Games.
a subsidized portable interim housing development ($2/day, all-inclusive).
an affordable homeownership program (Starting at $140).
available only to male athletes, coaches and VIPs attending the Games.
fenced and guarded by “cowboys” on horseback.
the protagonist in the widely-reported-on “success story” of LA32.
origin of the International Organizing Committee mandate for Olympic Villages in future host cities.
subject of a 1932 Los Angeles County Health Department (Housing Division) report.
ILLUSTRATIONS of Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum
The 1932 Summer Games in Los Angeles critically depended on skilled and diverse competitors attending to challenge USA teams. But the global economic depression which followed the 1929 stock market crash made overseas travel out-of-the-question for most serious athletes and spectators, and even domestic treks out west put a serious stress on athletes that attended from other states.
Village
It turned out, guaranteeing internationally traveling athletes comfortable and affordable accommodations and addressing their logistical concerns was the secret to drawing them to the remote, obscure place known only as a “suburb of Hollywood”. But convincing people to want to cross oceans and deserts in the middle of the summer during the Great Depression to the remote budding metropolis of Los Angeles wasn’t going to be easy. So an elusive village perched in the hills between the desert and the ocean was invented for the purpose of offering an accommodation they couldn’t resist.
The Olympic Village itself consisted of 500-600 two-bedroom cottages complete with toilets and showers, kitchenettes, bathhouses, chef’s kitchens, dining rooms, an LAFD fire station, a post office, a bank, a hospital, a radio station, a dentist, dry cleaning, laundry, a press box, and more — all temporary construction.
The village was built on 250 acres of private property in Baldwin Hills for a reported expense of $400,000, for the purpose of hosting international athletes for two weeks, and then the structures were to be sold or destroyed.
$100,000 worth of palm trees were planted, which outraged many citizens who felt that this expense was particularly frivolous. The invasive trees still stand today.
Two were never occupied, standing empty as models for the press and people who were interested in purchasing the cottages after the games. Furnished, they were $215 or $140 plain, with free international shipping included.
Athletes could stay in the village for an all-inclusive rate of $2/day, including all-you-can-eat catering and seamless taxi services to competitive events within the City.
Even with athletes’ travel discounted by the Organizing Committee, such as 50% off domestic train tickets and 20% off steamships from Europe, the cost was just low enough to accept. Still, several major countries only sent one athlete. China, the largest country in the world, only managed to send one sprinter. Chinese immigration had been banned by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and was not allowed again until 1943’s Magnuson Act passed.
While it felt to the athletes and their coaches like they were getting the deal of a lifetime on the experience of a lifetime—and they probably were, many still struggled to afford the journey.
A female runner recalls boarding a train from Chicago with her teammates and only having $5 to her name. A gold medalist hitchhiked home to East Hollywood after sneaking food out of the Olympic Village to feed his family.
More athletes from Brazil and Cuba’s teams didn’t even complete the journey due to running out of funds. 60 athletes from Brazil sold 50,000 pounds of coffee along the way but also encountered unmitigated expenses like a fare for crossing the Panama Canal. $1/person port taxes ultimately prevented around half of Brazil’s 60-athlete team from disembarking.
Cuba arrived to a port in Texas with a boat full of sugar, which was reportedly less valuable than coffee and they were also turned away. Note: I suspect it may have been more political than that, but that’s the story on record.
And yet, without China, Cuba and Brazil’s interest and participation, LA32 could have been a repeat of the disastrous and problematic 1904 Olympics.
Los Angeles County Health Department - Housing Division’s 1932 report, “Xth Olympiad 1932 Olympic Village” consists mostly of uncaptioned black-and-white photographs, with few words besides the Olympic “motto” (which appears on a postcard on page 2).
When observed with the same Department’s Habitations of Unemployed in Los Angeles County report (also from 1932), stunning juxtapositions illustrate “the Los Angeles way of doing things”: How did the same County Department document deplorable outhouses at Depression hovels and photograph ephemeral subsidized housing without committing to bringing the former on par with the latter?
For the County to publish both 1932 reports without relating the problem of its own impoverished residents living in unsanitary conditions with the ceremonious building and demolishing/liquidating of hundreds of decent 4-person homes seems incongruous. It illustrates Los Angeles’ commitment to corruption, a deliberate indifference for actual health, and its competitive prioritization of image above all.
One report should have answered the other, but it instead serves as a retrospective explanation of how such a situation came to exist in the first place. “The Los Angeles way of doing things” seems to be the (ongoing) problem, and people living in substandard shelters are a persistent symptom we still see today, aggravated by subsidized sports projects.
Within about six weeks after the Olympics, the remaining houses had been scrapped or shipped—free of charge, another Organizing Committee subsidy—around the globe. Since some of them remain standing today, we can see who benefited from “the Los Angeles way of doing things”—particularly, Los Angeles’ take on Depression-era subsidized housing and home ownership. It was real-estate speculators that already had land and wanted to start colonies of their own in Laguna’s Bluebird Canyon and Palm Springs who reaped the rewards of this affordable homeownership opportunity. (There is one exception below.) You can still stay in the last one in Palm Springs for $400-600/night.
President Hoover didn’t trouble himself too much with LA32 because he was preoccupied with the Bonus Army’s protest encampment in Washington.
After these 1932 Health Department Reports but before the 1933 statewide one-day homeless census (that I discussed in When will we finally know how many homeless people there are?), the United States elected a new leader in NY Governor FDR, who personally boosted the 1932 Winter Games in Lake Placid. It is thought that President Hoover’s mishandling of the Bonus Army’s protest encampment/“Hooverville” that resulted in two WWI veterans being killed by D.C. police caused people to lose faith in their leader. Unfortunately, like Hoover’s Senate in mid-June 1932, JFK would go on to veto a similar bill in 193
A decade later, we would see visually similar “villages” erected as WW2 internment sites for mostly Japanese-Americans in a shameful violation of the principles of the American Constitution. Japan sent 157 athletes to LA32 and won 18 medals—making them the fifth-ranking participating nation.
Laguna Hills artist community
Several of the cabins were shipped to Laguna Hills, where a village was constructed with streets named after medal winners. The first cabin sold for $400. Most have been altered to the point of no longer being recognizable.
A village maintained
CHERRIL DOTY In celebration and homage to a wonderful summer, the onset of autumn and more, residents of the small…www.latimes.com
Palm Springs short-term vacation rental
You can still rent an Olympic cottage in Palm Springs for several hundreds of dollars per night.
Plaza Cultura y Artes
The most accessible original Olympic cottage is still in use by one Olvera Street Vendor!
You can visit an original 1932 Olympic Village Cottage for free because there’s one on public display right by Metro’s Union Station in LA Plaza Cultura y Artes near the El Pueblo monument. The painted cabin even has an address: E-19 Olvera Street.
L.A. TACO noted in 2010 that this original cottage has been in use by the same vendor ever since its donation to a street vendor in Los Angeles from the LA32 Mexican Olympic Rotarians in 1933, as commemorated by a hand-painted tile plaque:
1932—1984
Built to house athletes during the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, this cabin was used by Mexican team members.
Donated by the Rotarians to Olvera Street in 1933, it has been used by the same merchant ever since.
Why didn’t Los Angeles use any Olympic Village cottages to benefit the working public?
Why was only remaining cabin in L.A. that is publicly accessible the one that was gifted back to a vendor in the U.S.A. from Mexico?
What if all 600 Olympic cottages had been as accessible to the public and remained in Los Angeles?
What if they had been used to replace the Hooverville sheds and shacks in Florence-Graham, the L.A. River Wash and elsewhere, as pictured in the Health Department’s 1932 report?
Note: If I recall correctly, there’s also a public outlet right near the original 1932 Olympic Village cottage where you can charge a phone early in the morning, without being bothered (as long as you try to wrap it up once people start going to work around the Plaza).
Records:
Supreme Court of California • 1935 • XTH OLYMPIAD COMMITTEE OF THE GAMES OF LOS ANGELES 1932 v. AMERICAN OLYMPIC ASS STATE
Reports:
Los Angeles County Health Department Housing Division Report X Olympiad 1932 Olympic Village
Xth Olympiade Committee of the games of Los Angeles, U.S.A. Official Report 1932 Xth Olympiad
Papers:
Sean Dinces Padres on Mount Olympus: Los Angeles and the Production of the 1932 Olympic Mega-Event
David B. Welky Viking Girls, Mermaids, and Little Brown Men: U.S. Journalism and the 1932 Olympics
Jeremy White The Los Angeles Way of Doing Things: The Olympic Village and the Practice of Boosterism in 1932
Amazing, isn't it, how willingly some of our governments will spend money to support Olympic Games and wars, and how reticent they are to spend on the well-being of their citizens?