Long Beach’s longstanding Olympics history to be on display at new Historical Society exhibit ...Middle East

If you’ve ever been curious about how the Olympic Games have shaped Long Beach — from its infrastructure and economy to cultural relevance on the global stage — the Historical Society of Long Beach has something in store to scratch that intellectual itch.

The Historical Society, 4260 Atlantic Ave., will celebrate the launch of its newest exhibit, “Olympics on the Golden Shore,” on Tuesday, Aug. 21. The exhibit features hundreds of artifacts, photos, Olympic ephemera and more, all of which document the longstanding relationship between Long Beach and the Games dating to 1932.

Los Angeles hosted the Summer Olympics in 1932 and 1984, with Long Beach hosting multiple events during each iteration. Long Beach will once again be a major venue during the upcoming 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

“There’s so much history to cover,” HSLB Executive Director Julie Bartolotto said in a Tuesday, Aug. 12, interview. “Coming out of this show, I really see how the Olympics put Los Angeles and Long Beach on the map — in both ’32 and ’84.”

The exhibit is a collaboration with Long Beach itself, which allocated $100,000 to the project in the fiscal year 2025 budget, according to an Aug. 5 city memo, with the goal of thoroughly documenting the history of not only the Olympics’ impact on Long Beach — but also the city’s role in securing LA’s bids for the games in 1932, 1984 and, of course, the 2028 Games.

It also features items donated by members of the Long Beach community, ranging from an official LA84 Olympic album to volunteer jackets, banners, pins and much more.

“What we covered was the ’32 games, the development of Marine Stadium, the legacy of those Games — and the same for ’84,” Bartolotto said. “We learned about and documented how Long Beach was engaged in helping get the bid, especially in ’32. Marine Stadium and its expansion was key to LA getting the Games.”

At the time of the 1932 Olympics, Marine Stadium wasn’t yet Marine Stadium — instead, it was simply a channel that was in the process of being expanded, Bartolotto said. It was the only location in all of Los Angeles fit to host Olympic rowing at the time, according to a report from the 1932 Olympic Committee, which presented a major opportunity for Long Beach to make its mark on the event.

“The city agreed to dredge the lagoon to the necessary length and depth, to straighten the sides, and to enclose the course completely with a fence,” the report said, “with necessary entrances for the public, contestants and officials, all according to plans furnished by the committee.”

The Olympic Committee agreed to construct grandstands and docks to launch the boats, among other infrastructure.

“As a result,” the report said, “Long Beach now has a permanent Rowing Stadium.”

The exhibit will also explore how the 1932 Olympics — despite happening during the Great Depression — still managed to turn a profit, including the ways the event’s organizers incentivized the general public to attend the Games.

“They consciously tried to keep ticket prices low. They also did cheap things to promote the Games,” Bartolotto said.

Those efforts included developing a rubber stamp with Long Beach’s Olympic logo, which could easily and affordably be printed onto advertising materials and mail.

The Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce, at the time, also developed a sticker to advertise the 1932 Games. The stickers were sold by unemployed people, Bartolotto said, in an initiative aimed at simultaneously marketing the Olympics and supporting locals who were out of work.

“It was interesting to know what they did during the Depression,” Bartolotto added.

The 1932 Olympics were so successful in both Los Angeles and Long Beach, in fact, that LA embarked on a campaign to get the Games back almost immediately — a campaign that lasted about 50 years.

But it wasn’t until 1984 that LA finally secured the Games again, thanks in large part to Long Beach’s ability to accommodate five events: volleyball, archery, yachting, and both the preliminary and final competitions for fencing.

The 1968 Olympic Trials, which were held in Long Beach at locations including the Belmont Plaza Pool, Cal State Long Beach and the Convention & Entertainment Center complex, also helped secure LA’s bid for the ’84 Games, Bartolotto said.

At the time, world cities had begun to shy away from hosting the Olympics after financial disaster, political strife and other issues had marred the reputations of previous hosts.

“So it wasn’t really popular, right,” Bartolotto said.

But since Iran — which was in the early stages of a revolution in 1977 — was the only other competition, LA won the bid after that country dropped out.

It also wasn’t exactly popular with the LA locals, especially in the low-income South Central neighborhood, largely populated by Black and Latino residents, where a majority of the 1984 Games were hosted — to the point that in 1978, LA residents passed a ballot measure banning the organizing committee from using taxpayers dollars to fund the Games, making it the first privately financed Olympics.

“Announcing that not only would it break with recent Olympic failures, but it would also deliver a ‘surplus’ legacy of $20 million to the people of LA, the committee tethered itself to the profit motive in all its future activity,” according to a 2024 article in the International Journal of the History of Sport. “Its product — what it strove to produce a surplus of — was cash. So successful was it in this endeavor, that the final profit was more than 10 times its original estimate.”

One key way the 1984 Olympics achieved its success, of course, was through branding. Rather than focusing on the nationalistic overtones of past Olympics — such as employing America’s red, white and blue colors — the architects of LA84’s look took an entirely different approach.

That Olympics was the origin of “festive federalism,” created by the Olympic Committee and designers Deborah Sussman and Paul Prezja, who created the look of LA84 — the vibrant oranges, magenta, blues and yellows now synonymous with the Games.

“With festive federalism, the LAOOC sought to fuse together these contradictory strategies through vague celebrations of apolitical diversity, but went beyond the nation, seeking to build a unifying Olympic identity that was post-racial and post-national,” the International Journal of the History of Sport said. “In the Olympic city, one was free to be as individualistic as one wanted, free to embrace whatever pluralistic set of identities one chose.”

Los Angeles and Long Beach were adorned in that festive federalism aesthetic using materials that allowed the Olympic Committee to keep costs down. Some of those surviving artifacts, including a “sonotube” used for wayfinding during the Games, will be featured in HSLB’s exhibit.

But beyond those broader Olympic impacts in Los Angeles, HSLB’s exhibit will drill down on Long Beach specifically, recounting the vignettes of locals involved with the Games, how some lasting city programs and cultural events — like the Belmont Shore Sand Sculpture Contest — were created because of the Games, and what history can teach us about what’s in store for the city three years down the line.

Besides the exhibit, HSLB is also working on compiling an in-depth report about Long Beach’s Olympic history, which will be presented to the City Council when it’s finished. The nearly 80-page report, Bartolotto said, is mostly complete aside from some finishing touches.

And even though the exhibit will be on display at HSLB for now, Bartolotto said, it was intentionally designed for travel — so that it might be relocated throughout the city as part of community events leading up to the 2028 Games. Those plans, though, are still being developed by the city and HSLB.

The Historical Society’s exhibit will open on Tuesday, Aug. 21. Public hours will be from 1 to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 1 to 7 p.m. on Thursdays, and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays. For more details, visit hslb.org.

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